The National Communications Commission (NCC) yesterday said that it will start its first arbitration meeting with cable service providers and satellite channel operators on Thursday to discuss a dispute over content authorization fees.
NCC spokesperson Wong Po-tsung (翁柏宗) said the dispute began last year as new cable service operators complained they were facing unfair treatment from satellite TV channel agents, who negotiated content authorization fees on behalf of the channel operators with all cable service operators.
“The new cable service operators said they have yet to attract subscribers, but they are asked to pay the same amount of content authorization fees as other cable operators, which is calculated by factoring in 15 percent of the number of registered households in the service area,” Wong said.
“The agents of satellite TV channels said that they were only charging a guaranteed minimum amount from cable system operators,” he said.
Sky Digital Convergence Service (全國數位天空), which is based in Banciao District (板橋), new Taipei City, has signed only 10,000 subscribers since the launch of its cable service last year, Wong said.
However, the content authorization fee that the cable operator has to pay is calculated by factoring in about 74,800 registered households in Banciao, he said.
The pricing mechanism charges all cable systems a fixed content authorization fee, regardless of the number of subscribers each cable operator has, Wong said.
He said this has caused new cable service operators to report the practice to the Fair Trade Commission, which ruled in October last year that major TV channel agents have given differential treatment to new cable operators and operators branching out to new areas.
As such, the agents were collectively fined NT$126 million (US$3.97 million), Wong said.
The new cable operators have also asked the NCC to step in to arbitrate the dispute, Wong said.
“The commission ruled last week that cable, video-on-demand and direct satellite broadcasting systems are considered broadcasting platforms. Content providers must not give differential treatment to different platform operators,” he said.
Asked if established cable operators could also argue that they are being treated unfairly for having to pay a higher content authorization fee than new cable operators, Wong said TV channel agents could consider adopting a progressive approach in charging new cable operators.
“Rather than a fixed content fee for all cable operators, the agents could lower the minimum guaranteed fee for new cable operators and gradually raise the fee to the standard level as the new operators expand their customer base. The negotiation should give room for all parties to survive,” Wong said.
Apart from investigating if channel operators had discriminated against new cable operators through differential pricing schemes, the commission would also investigate if the cable operators discriminated against certain channels by refusing to include them in their channel lineup, Wong said.
Cable operators must not suspend their services because of the dispute with channel operators, he added.
LOUD AND PROUD Taiwan might have taken a drubbing against Australia and Japan, but you might not know it from the enthusiasm and numbers of the fans Taiwan might not be expected to win the World Baseball Classic (WBC) but their fans are making their presence felt in Tokyo, with tens of thousands decked out in the team’s blue, blowing horns and singing songs. Taiwanese fans have packed out the Tokyo Dome for all three of their games so far and even threatened to drown out home team supporters when their team played Japan on Friday. They blew trumpets, chanted for their favorite players and had their own cheerleading squad who dance on a stage during the game. The team struggled to match that exuberance on the field, with
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. The single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, saber-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. A single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 800,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Whether Japan would help defend Taiwan in case of a cross-strait conflict would depend on the US and the extent to which Japan would be allowed to act under the US-Japan Security Treaty, former Japanese minister of defense Satoshi Morimoto said. As China has not given up on the idea of invading Taiwan by force, to what extent Japan could support US military action would hinge on Washington’s intention and its negotiation with Tokyo, Morimoto said in an interview with the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) yesterday. There has to be sufficient mutual recognition of how Japan could provide
RSS