TT: The Consumers' Foundation is concerned that new services will be expensive and full of junk channels. What is your response to criticism like that?
Dea: Look to tomorrow and not to yesterday. The basic cable television service in Taiwan was homegrown to a great extent and that's why there are 80 channels of basic service. Yes, many of them are lower-grade quality, but they are home grown. Taiwan has per capita more televisions than any other market by far. The new services are not the basic, it is not an extension of the basic. We don't want to do that.
Right now we have one additional tier. There are 24 channels of video and 24 channels of digital radio. We cannot afford to add any more channels on the basic as there is a rate cap. We offer Adventure One, the Reality Channel, The Soundtrack Channel (like MTV but movie soundtracks), Fashion TV, Arirang, ABC out of Australia, Bloomberg. We are looking at BBC and MGM for that service. Especially with the English language programming, a lot of that is niche programming. That shouldn't be forced into the basic.
TT: Are you thinking of any other tiers or packages?
Dea: Not yet, not until the regulatory environment starts to open up. I'd very much like to break that out and have a news tier, a foreign language tier, an erotica tier, a sports tier, a movie tier, and let the customer go whatever direction they want to go. And that is international standards.
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