Over the past decade, early January has traditionally brought a swift end to the festive season for Taiwan's television viewers. This is the time when the Koo's Group (
All we ever see in this annual ritual is government authority being repeatedly trampled by two powerful consortiums. Last year, it took the then KMT secretary-general John Chang (
What are we to expect next year? Without a major election in the offing, we can be sure that consumers will have to fend for themselves.
What is different about this year's cable TV war is that the two big operators now appear to be fighting for the next pie in the communications market: broadband networks. Koo's Group and Rebar each claim that they have recently signed contracts with cable operators serving three to four million subscribers. Which means that the market has been effectively dominated by them. With such a captive audience, they can afford to expand the delivery of their own content, even at the expense of channels that are probably more popular among viewers. And because cable operators take their fees in a lump sum -- six months up-front -- viewers are locked in for a fixed period. This allows the two groups to actively cross-promote their new Internet services, which they see as the multi-billion-dollar future of the industry.
What can the government do? Many have pointed their fingers at Chao Yi (
Since Chao Yi took office as GIO director, the two cable TV stations he used to head up have both run into trouble. He has effectively answered the question asked by this newspaper upon his appointment: how can a man who was so recently a media boss maintain neutrality in the event of a dispute among his former friends and employers? He can't. By contrast, FTC chairman Chao's long tenure in her position makes her claims to ignorance of the cable TV dispute hard to believe.
Yet it is not only these two who are deserving of censure. In fact, the current dispute poses a serious challenge to the entire administration's credibility, caught as it is between two feuding KMT business titans.
Indeed, the presence of Koo Chen-fu (
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My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
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As former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) wrapped up his visit to the People’s Republic of China, he received his share of attention. Certainly, the trip must be seen within the full context of Ma’s life, that is, his eight-year presidency, the Sunflower movement and his failed Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement, as well as his eight years as Taipei mayor with its posturing, accusations of money laundering, and ups and downs. Through all that, basic questions stand out: “What drives Ma? What is his end game?” Having observed and commented on Ma for decades, it is all ironically reminiscent of former US president Harry