SUMMARY
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MANILA, Philippines – The TV5 network has filed a complaint with the National Telecommunications Commission (NTC) against SkyCable for failing to air its programs for over two and a half hours on December 13.
TV5 – a unit of MediaQuest Holdings owned by the Philippine Long Distance Telephone Company (PLDT) and a sister company of cable provider Cignal Digital TV – also reported that TV5 on SkyCable fluctuated and was interchanged with AksyonTV.
Cignal, the country’s direct-to-home (DTH) satellite provider, competes directly with SkyCable.
Monitoring records showed that TV5 was not aired by SkyCable in Metro Manila from 2:10 pm to 4:47 pm on December 13.
“Total off-air time was from 2:10:20 to 4:47:55 or 2 hours, 37 minutes, and 35 seconds. This was monitored from our Metro Manila monitoring site,” the records stated.
Dan De Padua, head of programming of TV5, said in a statement that the company has filed a complaint before NTC.
“On December 13, SkyCable failed to carry the TV5 signal for over 2:30 hours, thus adversely affecting our channel viewership and depriving the public of an important news and entertainment source,” De Padua said.
De Padua added that the signal loss was confirmed by their TV events team, who, per standard procedure, used a backup recording using free-to-air sources to encode the missed airings.
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 7 minutes.
Previous complaint
SkyCable said it had been diligent in performing its functions under the guidelines set by the Cable Television Act of 2004.
This is not the first time though that SkyCable is facing a complaint before the NTC.
In early 2013, GMA Network Incorporated (GMA7) also filed a complaint over channel reassignment against SkyCable, owned by rival ABS-CBN Corporation of the Lopez family.
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.
GMA7 has been complaining about the channel reassignment being undertaken by SkyCable.
The network’s channel assignment was changed from Channel 12 to Channel 14 in 2003, and to Channel 85 in September 2012.
In both instances, NTC directed SkyCable to return GMA7 to Channel 12.
SkyCable acquired the assets of Home Cable from the PLDT Group, which now operates the country’s DTH satellite TV and second biggest pay TV company, Cignal. – Rappler.com
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