Chinese over-the-top (OTT) service provider iQiyi cannot register as a provider in Taiwan after the Mainland Affairs Council declared it to be an illegal service, the National Communications Commission (NCC) said yesterday.
Both iQiyi and WeTV were deemed to be illegal Chinese OTT operators in an interdepartmental meeting on Friday last week, officials said, adding that this prohibits them from marketing their services in Taiwan or seeking subscribers.
The government plans to block a local server that iQiyi has been using to transmit content to domestic audiences, which would disrupt its content transmission.
Photo: Chu Pei-hsiung, Taipei Times
OTT Entertainment Ltd, which is enlisted by iQiyi to handle subscription-related affairs in Taiwan, on Monday said that its local service platform does not disseminate political content, adding that it has invested more than NT$1 billion (US$33.38 million) in content production.
NCC spokesman Hsiao Chi-hung (蕭祈宏) said that the council decided that iQiyi breached the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (台灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例) by offering an OTT TV service, which the act does not permit Chinese to invest in.
Taiwanese OTT operators are not allowed to launch such services in China, he added.
A commission draft act on OTT TV services would require all legal OTT operators to register with the commission, although iQiyi is no longer a legal operator, he said.
Commission officials said that iQiyi’s Taipei office was set up under a company legally registered with the Ministry of Economic Affairs, Qiyi.com Hong Kong Ltd.
The company streams content over a server that it leases from a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based global content delivery network, Akamai Technologies, whose clients include YouTube and Netflix, they said, adding that tackling the issue would be difficult from a technical perspective.
To resolve the controversies surrounding iQiyi, Hsiao said that the council would need to amend the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area so that investments from Hong Kong and China are equated if related, something used to revoke iQiyi’s business registration in the nation.
Also, the ministry would need to amend regulations so that Taiwanese companies would be banned from offering prohibited services in Taiwan, as such a change is needed so that Akamai could drop iQiyi as a client, Hsiao added.
NATURE TAKES ITS COURSE: The agency’s head said he felt a sense of loss watching red-banded snakes eat the babies, as they had decided on non-intervention The Forestry and Nature Conservation Agency yesterday released a documentary on a hundred-pace viper that had incubated 16 eggs, all of which hatched, but only a baby viper escaped after they were attacked by red-banded snakes. The agency’s Taichung branch last year launched the viper reproduction monitoring project soon after forest rangers Lin Chun-yu (林俊佑) and Chou Chia-cheng (周家成) spotted a pregnant hundred-pace viper in a grass-covered burrow near a parking lot in Tbulan Village (松鶴部落). The Atayal village, in Taichung’s Heping District (和平), is headed by Ecyang Yapu, who was positive about the project and assisted in access control and power
The Coast Guard Administration (CGA) yesterday said that it had deployed vessels to “monitor” Chinese ships operating in waters off the east coast. The CGA said it dispatched vessels in response to a China Coast Guard announcement that it had carried out another “routine law-enforcement patrol” in waters off the east coast. “The CGA firmly rejects China’s cognitive warfare campaign of ‘law enforcement in name, jurisdictional expansion in practice,’” it said on X. As of 11am yesterday, two China Coast Guard ships were “loitering and drifting” about 105 nautical miles (195km) and 74 nautical miles east of Green Island (綠島) respectively, it said. It
A sharp rise in compensation to be paid by air force officers who leave before completing their required service could indicate an increase in pilots leaving the military early, an analyst said on Friday, warning that the trend could worsen a shortage of experienced personnel. Chieh Chung (揭仲), a researcher at the Association for Strategic Foresight, issued the warning even though the number of volunteer military personnel is expected to increase next year. The planned headcount for volunteer military personnel, covering officers, noncommissioned officers (NCO) and enlisted soldiers, is 158,223 for next year, up 4,258 from 153,965 this year, Chieh said. The increase
Potential improvements to munitions used by China’s long-range rocket-artillery units could extend their range to cover the entire Miyako Strait, which might give the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) the ability to secure the strategic waterway, the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said in a report. The PLA’s long-range rocket-artillery units deployed along the Taiwan Strait are concentrated along the coast of Fujian Province, including Changle, Pingtan and Shishi, the quarterly report on China said. The artillery brigades of the PLA’s 71st, 72nd and 73rd group armies have been deployed, with preparations for potential battlefield operations under way since August 2022, the report
RSS