Beyond Cable seeks review of NTC ruling

Beyond Cable, the holding company of Sky Cable and Home Cable, is set to ask the National Telecommunication Commission (NTC) to reconsider its recent ruling ordering the cable TV companies to return GMA-7 to its original channel assignment.

Beyond Cable legal counsel Gerardo Ramiro said he has yet to received the official copy from the NTC of the order. "But based what we gathered from the copy which GMA-7 furnished us, we will likely file a motion for reconsideration within 15 days after receipt from the NTC of the order," he explained.

GMA Network had questioned before the NTC the transfer by Sky Cable and Home Cable of its channel assignment from Channel 12 to Channel 14, claiming this has caused widespread signal distortion degradation in the transmission of GMA’s television signal.

The commission late last month granted GMA’s petition and ordered Sky Cable to return GMA-7 to its original channel assignment.

Ramiro said in an interview that it appears that NTC’s decision ruled on a 1999 case filed by the Kapisanan ng mga Brodkaster ng Pilipinas (KBP) as well as the GMA Network case filed just last February.

"This is one point that we likely going to question. In the KBP case, we filed motions and pleadings. But in the undocketed GMA case, we were not given a chance to answer formally. There was only one occasion, sometime in March, that we were called to a meeting and Pilipino, Cable Corp. even agreed to return GMA to its original channel assignment. We were therefore surprised when the NTC ruling on the KBP case included the GMA case," he told The STAR.

The Philippine Cable Television Association (PCTA), which includes more than 300 cable TV companies nationwide, earlier said that it is now in consultation with its lawyers as it is set to question NTC’s ruling, which PCTA officials said made a policy pronouncement on the matter of channel assignment without consulting the cable TV industry.

PCTA president Manuel Dabao said the NTC did not limit itself to deciding on the matter of KBP and GMA, but likewise ruled that cable TV companies cannot make any rechannelling without prior approval from the commission.

Meanwhile, Beyond Cable officials yesterday emphasized that it was both technically impossible and statistically improbable to distort signals of a single channel.

GMA Network earlier accused Sky Cable, owned by the Lopez group, of deliberately distorting GMA’s signal by assigning it to Channel 14, to gain an unfair advantage for another Lopez-owned company and GMA’s staunch rival ABC-CBN.

Cable officials explained that GMA-7’s signal is received via fiberoptic link by Home Cable and transmitted as is to system subscribers.

They added that the Home Cable headend (located in San Juan) is highly secure and uses precision equipment to ensure signal quality is always at the best levels. "There is no human Processing involved in the transmission of cable signals," they said.

It was explained that most reports of poor signal quality are caused by illegal connections and damaged cable lines at the last mile or at the subscriber’s end. A technical inspection of Pilipino Cable Corp.’s headed by GMA-7’s engineering team confirmed there was no distortion occurring, while a check with a complaining subscriber who called the GMA-7 hotline for such complaints showed the TV set was defective and did not received good signals from all channels.