Maldives Introduces New Regime for Cable TV

Text of report by Maldives newspaper Haveeru Daily website on 17 September

Male, 17 September: Six years after its enforcement, an amended cable television law came into force yesterday.

The new regulations are based “90 per cent” on cable TV operators’ recommendations, while factors despised by the operators are also included, according to Information Ministry’s assistant director Mohamed Arif.

“We have also waived some of the clauses that were originally in the 2001 law,” he said, while adding that “not much” has been changed to the six-year-old law.

One of the changes brought against the wishes of cable TV operators is the penalty of cutting points from operating licences in proportion to offences committed which may include flaunting of the regulations and showing “objectionable” and “inappropriate” content.

For instance, local sensitivity has forced government as a regulatory body to enforce a “self-censorship” rule whereby cable TV operators are asked not to air programmes promoting any religion other than Islam or advertisements featuring alcohol and beer, and programmes showing nudity.

At the very extreme, there were times when even an image of the Pope would be “interrupted” with a blank screen while even educational programmes on the National Geographic channel such as anthropological studies into scantily clad Amazonian tribal cultures were not broadcast at all.

An earlier feature was also to block any news or feature segments on Maldives that are deemed politically damaging to the incumbent government of President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom.

The new law also aims to set a ceiling on monthly fees paid by customers and is designed in a way to facilitate healthy competition and wider, easier and cheaper access to cable television services in the atolls, a move which some see as scoring sorely needed political points by the government from a population whose prospects for entertainment and recreation are extremely limited.

“Our policy aims to dismantle any monopoly power held over the industry, and ensure a fair and free competitive ground where both big-time and small-scale cable TV operators have equal opportunity in ensuring maximum benefits from such a huge investment,” Arif said.

A sore point for cable TV operators is the declaring void of “exclusivity” of some channels by some cable TV operators. The issue reached a head-on during the last soccer World Cup when private cable TV operators protested a government move to provide delayed live coverage of all the matches to this football crazed nation.

Information Minister Mohamed Nasheed, whose passionate drive resulted in the “amendments” to the regulations, on his personal website stated “some of the main goals of revised rules” as:

– disallowing exclusivity over cable channels to be recognized or enforced in the territory of the Maldives despite the fact there maybe contracts entered on that basis:

– putting a ceiling on maximum fee that can be collected from a single customer by a certain operator in respect of its packages of channels and putting controls on the price structure, and;

– requiring classification and grading of channels under the recently introduced guidelines of the National Bureau of Classification.

Originally published by Haveeru Daily website, Male, in English 17 Sep 07.

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