By Lenie Lectura
Business Mirror

The cable-television industry is going to see a mere 2-percent growth this year in terms of paying subscribers this year, as losses due to signal piracy are expected to remain at P6 billion to P7 billion.

The Philippine Cable Television Association (PCTA), a group representing the country’s more than 400 cable-TV operators, said the number of paying cable-TV subscribers in the country stood at 1.5 million in end-2007 as against 3 million illegal subscribers.

In 2006 PCTA president Allan Dungao said the number of legal cable-TV subscribers stood at 1.5 million but illegal subscribers, or those that do not pay but are able to feed cable-TV signals into their TV sets via illegal connection, stood at 2.5 million then.

Losses recorded in 2005 stood at P4.5 billion. In the same year, the government was deprived of P2.3 billion in taxes by the growing incidence of cable-TV theft in the country. The country ranked third in Asia in terms of the extent of pay-TV theft, also in 2005.

“The nonpaying have even increased now. Signal-piracy theft should really be addressed, and we hope that the signal- theft law will be passed soon. This law should be able to cut by half the number of illegal subscribers and reduce gradually the industry’s losses by 10 percent,” he said last week.

The proposed law imposes penalty on nonpaying cable-TV subscriber.
Dungao said the continued deployment of digital boxes or set-top boxes also helped eliminate illegal connections.

The country has 13 million potential cable-TV subscribers, but the number of illegal subscribers continue to outnumber the legitimate ones, a phenomenon that clearly hurts legitimate cable operators and even the government, which loses a substantial portion of its revenues because pirate-cable companies don’t pay taxes and license fees.

The country’s cable-television penetration rate remains unchanged at approximately 8 percent, way below the region’s average rate of 30 percent to 35 percent.
Cable-TV firms in the country have raised their monthly subscription fees by an average of 5 percent to 10 percent, he added.