The Cabinet's Council of Indigenous Peoples is planning to spend NT$150 million to improve television reception in mountainous areas by the end of the year, paving the way for the establishment of an Aboriginal television channel.
"We plan to take a two-stage approach to achieve our goal of improving television reception in mountainous areas," said Pu Chung-cheng (
The first stage is to have five of the nation's terrestrial television channels share one satellite to broadcast their programs. The council plans to pick the highest bidder by the beginning of next month and complete this stage of the project by Oct. 25.
The second stage will be to help the 29,000 families living in mountainous areas with bad reception or no cable services to install a satellite disk to receive the signals. Each family may receive a subsidy of between NT$6,000 and NT$8,000 per disk. The council hopes to complete the second phase of the project by Dec. 20.
Once the reception problem has improved, Pu said, the council plans to spend about three months on launching the Aboriginal television channel by the end of this year, if the legislature unfreezes the NT$330 million earmarked for establishing the exclusive channel during the next legislative session.
The Aborigine Education Law (
However, the plan stalled because legislators wanted the council to solve the bad-reception problem first and then work on establishing the channel.
Statistics show that only 60 percent of the nation's 427,000 Aboriginals are able to receive terrestrial television channels.
Jim Lu (
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