Cable TV industry needs new laws to avert more losses

The local cable television industry is in danger of bleeding to death unless the government acts fast and laws are passed to protect the sector, the Philippine Cable Television Association (PCTA) has warned.

PCTA vice-president for Luzon and external affairs chairman Philip Jean has warned of dire losses for the industry unless government intervenes "to enact new laws and install proper guidelines to regulate the industry."

"It is high time that government authorities should take a bigger role in putting order in this seemingly messy situation and take a larger part of the responsibility," he said.

Jean argued that on top of the P4 billion lost yearly due to cable TV piracy, legitimate cable operators are greatly affected by the operations of illegal pay TV firms and by higher content costs.

He said the local cable industry and their content providers have been unable come up with a unified front to address these problems "because of the absence of responsive laws."

To improve market shares, some local cable companies have opted to forge content monopolies that prompted their content providers to jack up their prices. Program content in the country is among the highest in the region, following that of Hong Kong and Singapore.

But this has only prompted smaller cable companies to resort to cheaper and inferior programming or intensified signal theft, Jean said. "Ergo, everyone loses and no one gains in the end. The entire industry inevitably suffers."

According to Jean, the local industry is equivalent to about P4.3 billion yearly with a legal subscriber base of around one million users. "But even with this volume of transactions, some content providers still claim that they are not doing business in the country or are facing losses thus evading the payment of taxes on profits," he pointed out.

Worse, the PTCA official added that foreign content providers enjoy intellectual property rights protection while local cable companies do not have any legal means to even penalize signal theft.