The National Communications Commission (NCC) yesterday vowed to push amendments to the outdated Cable Television Act (有線電視法) to facilitate the transition to a nationwide digital television service.
NCC planning department chief Ji Xiao-zheng (紀效正) said the commission’s goal of doing away with analog TV channels by 2013 would be carried out in three stages.
UNDER-USED
Although 20 percent of the nation’s households were supposed to have made the transition to digital television services by the end of last year, only 3.99 percent of households are using the digital service.
Ji said the department has been examining possible factors hindering the transition, such as the price of digital set-top boxes, and that the commission would consider a research report scheduled to be completed by next month before proposing amendments to the articles in the Cable Television Act to the Legislative Yuan.
SET-TOP BOX
Ji said some commissioners have proposed that cable television service providers be required to provide one free set-top box per family, provide additional set-top boxes at a reduced cost to people who buy or rent them and stop charging customers rental fees once the service providers have recovered the costs of the set-top boxes.
Earlier this month, the commission approved a draft amendment to the Radio and Television Act (衛星廣播電視法), which still needs to be reviewed by the Legislative Yuan.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
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Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching