The government and cable television providers have reached a new impasse in the ongoing battle over the nation's roll-out of digital television services, an industry insider said yesterday.
At a meeting called by the Ministry of Transportation and Communications to set the standard for digital television signals yesterday morning, the nation's largest cable operators protested new regulations that are forcing them to choose one standard for their competing services without proper consultation.
"There has been no resolution," Arthur Shay (謝穎青), director of the Cable Broadband Institute in Taiwan (台灣有線寬頻產業協會), which represents the major providers, said yesterday.
"The [cable providers] expressed the opinion that it is not commercially feasible to force a compulsory platform on the industry," he said.
Terrestrial television channels have not agreed on one digital standard either, Shay said, adding it is unreasonable to demand that cable providers decide on one.
In order to reach the goal stated by the Ministry of Economic Affairs' Industrial Development Bureau Director-General Chen Chao-yi (陳昭義) on Monday to have 85 percent of the nation's homes connected to digital television via cable by 2006, the government has ordered providers to sell set-top digital descrambler boxes to consumers at below-market prices.
The providers are unwilling to lose money on the boxes, and say they should be allowed to lease or rent boxes to customers instead. They argue that the customer should be allowed to decide freely between openly competing and deregulated services.
For example, rented boxes can be returned and replaced when consumers change providers, Shay said yesterday, which would make the argument about standardized signals irrelevant.
Neighboring countries are also arguing about digital cable.
"There isn't one single box deployed in [South] Korea as there has been no agreement on standards," said Vivek Couto, executive director of HK-based research firm Media Partners Asia Ltd.
As of last month, only 0.4 percent of Taiwanese households had digital services, Media Partners reported.
DECOUPLING? In a sign of deeper US-China technology decoupling, Apple has held initial talks about using Baidu’s generative AI technology in its iPhones, the Wall Street Journal said China has introduced guidelines to phase out US microprocessors from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) from government PCs and servers, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favor of domestic options, the report said. Chinese officials have begun following the guidelines, which were unveiled in December last year, the report said. They order government agencies above the township level to include criteria requiring “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems when making purchases, the newspaper said. The US has been aiming to boost domestic semiconductor
Nvidia Corp earned its US$2.2 trillion market cap by producing artificial intelligence (AI) chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from start-ups to Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet Inc. Almost as important to its hardware is the company’s nearly 20 years’ worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps. Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm Inc, Google and Intel Corp plans to loosen Nvidia’s chokehold by going
ENERGY IMPACT: The electricity rate hike is expected to add about NT$4 billion to TSMC’s electricity bill a year and cut its annual earnings per share by about NT$0.154 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has left its long-term gross margin target unchanged despite the government deciding on Friday to raise electricity rates. One of the heaviest power consuming manufacturers in Taiwan, TSMC said it always respects the government’s energy policy and would continue to operate its fabs by making efforts in energy conservation. The chipmaker said it has left a long-term goal of more than 53 percent in gross margin unchanged. The Ministry of Economic Affairs concluded a power rate evaluation meeting on Friday, announcing electricity tariffs would go up by 11 percent on average to about NT$3.4518 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)
OPENING ADDRESS: The CEO is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence at the trade show’s opening on June 3, TAITRA said Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) chairperson and chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) is to deliver the opening keynote speech at Computex Taipei this year, the event’s organizer said in a statement yesterday. Su is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing (HPC) in the artificial intelligence (AI) era to open Computex, one of the world’s largest computer and technology trade events, at 9:30am on June 3, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) said. Su is to explore how AMD and the company’s strategic technology partners are pushing the limits of AI and HPC, from data centers to