The National Communications Commission (NCC) has asked a cable TV channel agent to not unilaterally suspend broadcast signals amid a dispute with two cable TV systems.
Ta Hsiang, a company representing MomoTV as well as 13 channels of Eastern Broadcasting Co (EBC) and Videoland Television Network in negotiations with cable systems, on July 31 notified DigiDom Cable TV Co and Taipei Net that starting yesterday it would suspend the transmission of broadcast signals of all 14 channels amid the dispute over content authorization fees, the NCC said.
DigiDom and Taipei Net asked the commission to intervene and help settle the dispute, NCC Platform and Businesses Department Director Wang De-wei (王德威) said.
The commission notified Ta Hsiang about the requests and told it that it cannot stop transmitting the channels’ signals while the dispute is still in arbitration, he said.
Asked about the two channels running news tickers to inform their viewers that the channels would be removed from the cable system line-up, he said that might have happened before the channels received official notifications from the NCC.
“From our perspective, we want them to work out the disagreement through arbitration,” he said.
However, he was not sure how much time it would take to resolve the dispute, he said.
Should the channels suspend the broadcasts without the commission’s approval, the NCC would handle the case as set out in the Satellite Broadcasting Act (衛星廣播電視法) regulations, Department of Broadcasting and Content specialist Chen Shu-ming (陳書銘) said.
NCC statistics showed that Taipei Net has about 52,000 subscribers and DigiDom has about 81,000.
These subscribers could lose access to the content on the channels represented by Ta Hsiang should the dispute remain unresolved, the commission said.
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