The government would follow due procedures when arbitrating between TV channel Eleven Sports and cable service operators, the National Communication Commission (NCC) said on Wednesday, adding that both sides should not compromise consumer interests because of the dispute.
The dispute arose when several cable operators refused to pay Eleven Sports more content authorization fees.
The channel said that it had notified the commission on Wednesday that, beginning on June 1, it would stop transmitting broadcast signals to Dafeng Cable Co and TWT Digital Communication, DigiDom Cable TV Co, as well as cable operators under China Network Systems (CNS).
Eleven Sports said on Facebook that over the past few years it has paid huge amounts in royalties to broadcast Lamingo Monkeys games, Premier League soccer and the International Basketball Federation World Cup, adding that it has not paid less than other sports channels.
“We tried to enrich our content and improve program quality, but we cannot even charge a reasonable content authorization fee, which has remained an unresolved issue. We are really sorry for what has happened. The last thing we want is sacrifice the interests of our viewers,” the channel said.
Two channel agents, each representing multiple channels, have already threatened to sue and suspend broadcast signals to Dafeng Cable Co if it refuses to pay the content authorization fees it owes.
Dafeng said that it is a new cable operator and has fewer subscribers, so it should not have pay the same content authorization fees as existing cable operators.
The commission has intervened in the dispute.
Many channel operators attributed the source of the dispute to multiple systems operator Taiwan Optical Platform Co’s decision to reduce the content authorization fees it pays to channel operators by 20 percent this year.
They said that this would motivate other cable operators to follow suit, significantly lowering the revenues earned by channel operators.
Asked how the commission plans resolve the two disputes, NCC Department of Frequency and Resources Deputy Director Niu Hsin-ren (牛信仁) said that changes to the cable channel lineup must be approved by the commission.
If cable operators make unauthorized changes, they would breach regulations by not following their business plans and compromising consumers’ interests, Niu said.
The commission on May 9 fined Taiwan Broadband Communications NT$3.3 million (US$104,606) and Formosa TV NT$200,000, when the former terminated broadcast signals for the latter after a dispute.
Asked if that means that Eleven Sports cannot stop transmitting signals even if it has unresolved disputes with cable operators or that cable operators cannot remove Eleven Sports from their lineups, Niu said that the commission would look at their business plans first.
Acting NCC spokesperson Hsiao Chi-hung (蕭祈宏) said that the commission’s procedures might differ in this dispute, depending on whether cable operators have specifically listed the channel in their business plans, or if users have to pay additional fee to view the channel.
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,
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
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
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: