An amendment to the Cable Television Act (有線廣播電視法) will be needed this year to raise the penetration rate of the digital cable television service to 75 percent by 2015, the National Communications Commission (NCC) said yesterday.
NCC spokesperson Chen Jeng-chang (陳正倉) said officials from the agency attended a cross-departmental meeting on the nation’s progress in digital convergence in May.
The Executive Yuan has decided that the penetration rate for digital cable TV should reach 75 percent by 2015 and has asked the commission to update its goals to meet the demands.
Chen said the commissioners used their weekly meeting yesterday to discuss what actions should be taken to reach the -Executive Yuan’s goal.
“It is a challenging task, considering that the penetration rate of digital cable TV is only 9 percent at the moment,” Chen said. “And given the rate of progress in the past few years, we estimate that the penetration rate could reach no more than 12 percent next year and 20 percent at best by 2015.”
To close the gap, Chen said the legislature would need to pass an amendment to the act during the next legislative session.
The amendment, he said, would give the commission the legal ground to ask cable television service operators to start offering digital services before their license is renewed.
At present, the commission has neither the “sticks” nor the “carrots” to demand that cable television operators provide a digital service, Chen said.
Asked why the Executive Yuan had set such a seemingly impractical goal, Chen said the executive branch may have sought to create a sense of urgency among legislators to quickly pass the amendment.
The Executive Yuan has promised to make the bill a priority when the new legislative session opens in September.
OLYMPICS
Meanwhile, Chen said that audiences in Taiwan would be able to watch the London Olympics next year in high definition (HD) as the commission will install 74 HD transmission stations for terrestrial TV.
He added that the commission is planning to spend NT$100 million (US$3.47 million) on the project.
Specifically, he said that the commission is subsidizing the Public Television Service NT$43.68 million to install 24 transmission stations. The remaining funds will subsidize other terrestrial TV operators.
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods