TV5 files complaint versus Skycable

MANILA, Philippines - TV5, a unit of MediaQuest Holdings Inc. owned by dominant carrier Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co. (PLDT) and a sister company of cable provider Cignal Digital TV, has filed a complaint against SkyCable Corp. for failing to air its programs last December.

Dan de Padua, head of programming of TV5, said in a statement that the company has filed a complaint before the National Telecommunications Commission (NTC) against  SkyCable for failing to carry the TV5 signal last Dec. 13.

“On Dec. 13, SkyCable failed to carry the TV5 signal for over two and a half hours, thus adversely affecting our channel viewership and depriving the public of an important news and entertainment source,” De Padua said.

Aside from failing to air TV5’s signal for over two hours, De Padua pointed out that there were also erratic airing when TV5 on SkyCable fluctuated and was interchanged with AksyonTV.

Monitoring records showed that TV5 was not aired by SkyCable in Metro Manila from 2:10 pm to 4:47 pm last Dec. 13.

The TV Events team has confirmed that there was indeed a signal loss to TV5 on our SkyCable recordings. Per standard procedure, our TV Events team used a backup recording using free-to-air sources to encode the missed airings. Total off-air time was from 14:10:20 to 16:47:55 or two hours, 37 minutes and 35 seconds. This was monitored from our Metro Manila monitoring site,” the monitoring report stated.

The report added that there were 10 other free-to-air channels NBN, 9TV, GNTV, ABS-CBN Sports+Action, RJTV, 9TV, IBC, ABS-CBN, GMA, and Aksyon TV that were affected by the loss of signal for seven minutes.

Cignal, the country’s premier DTH satellite provider, competes directly with SkyCable.

The cable TV provider said it has been diligent in performing its functions under the guidelines set by the Cable Television Act of 2004.

This is not the first time that SkyCable is facing a complaint before the NTC.

In early 2013, GMA Network Inc. also filed a complaint against SkyCable owned by rival ABS-CBN Corp. of the Lopez family over channel reassignment.

The broadcast company owned by the Gozon, Duavit, and Jimenez families complained over its channel reassignment to Channel 99 instead of Channel 12 by SkyCable.