The Cable Broadband Institute in Taiwan (CBIT) announced that it is planning to invest NT$10 billion (US$317.13 million) to complete the installation of set-top boxes to achieve full digitization of cable services by the end of this year.
Once providers stop transmitting analog signals, analog service subscribers will not be able to watch cable TV unless they have set-top boxes.
The institute represents the nation’s major multiple system operators.
Operators have already spent about NT$195 million installing 9.74 million set-top boxes in households across the nation, institute chief executive officer Claudia Peng (彭淑芬) said, adding that the total infrastructure investment needed to fully digitize cable services is estimated to surpass NT$55.3 billion.
The penetration rate for digital cable services is now 96 percent, she said, adding that cable operators have earmarked the additional NT$10 billion for installing set-top boxes in the final 4 percent of households.
In related news, National Communications Commission spokesperson Wong Po-tsung (翁柏宗) yesterday confirmed that a dispute between cable channel agents and new cable service operators over content authorization fees was not resolved at an arbitration meeting on Thursday last week.
New cable service operators complained that they were asked to pay the same content authorization fees as other cable operators, even though they did not have as many subscribers.
Rather than being charged at a flat rate equal to 15 percent of registered cable TV subscribers, new providers said that they should be charged based on the number of subscribers that they have.
According to Wong, cable channel agents such as Kbro refused to lower content authorization fees because they said other cable operators would ask that they be charged the same amount as the newcomers.
As the new providers refused to pay the price set by the agents, the two sides are now at in impasse, Wong said.
“It will take time for the two parties to reach an agreement,” he added.
Cable operators have also complained to the Fair Trade Commission about newcomers using what they say are predatory pricing strategies that disrupted the market order, with cable subscribers being charged unreasonably low monthly fees to access content, Wong said.
Apart from investigating whether channel operators discriminated against new cable operators by offering preferential pricing schemes, the commission is to also look into whether cable operators discriminated against particular channels by refusing to include them in their channel lineup, Wong said.
Meanwhile, commission chairwoman Nicole Chan (詹婷怡) reiterated that the Satellite Broadcasting Act (衛星廣播電視法) and Cable Radio and Television Act (有線廣播電視法) stipulate that cable channel agents must not treat public audio and visual broadcasting platforms preferentially without justification.
Nor can cable TV systems pressure or prevent channel operators from airing content on other public audio and visual broadcasting platforms without legitimate reasons, she said.
Under the regulations, channel operators can have content aired on Chunghwa Telecom’s multimedia-on-demand digital TV service, she said.
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