New Orleans -- Colombia's pay TV business got a big
shot in the arm with the recent news that some 53 new cable licenses will be granted there
in the next few months, and that more than 1,000 will be issued over the coming year.
The announcement was made by Carlos Muñoz, president of
Colombia's National Television Commission, speaking at the National Association of
Television Program Executives conference here last week.
'With only 5 percent of people [in Colombia]
subscribing to cable ... growth prospects for the industry are very attractive,'
Muñoz said.
Colombia has some 250,000 cable subscribers who buy their
services from about nine legally licensed operators. But there are an estimated 3 million
to 4 million households that receive satellite signals from a vast number of informal
operations dotted across the country. The coming licensing process is designed to bring
into the fold all of the informal companies that have mushroomed over the last decade,
when Colombia did not have a full legal framework regulating industry development.
According to Juan Diego Córdoba, general manager of
Medellin-based cable company Cable Sistema, hopeful new license holders have until
February to submit their business proposals for the first batch of 53 licenses. The
government plans to announce the winners of those licenses in April.
The commission, which is overseeing the licensing process,
will not select license winners through an auction -- it will award the new concessions on
the basis of merit. License winners will have to pay 10 percent of their monthly revenues
to the commission.
Muñoz said that in 1996, 2.7 percent of households in
urban areas received signals from the formal cable sector, while 33 percent received them
from the informal sector, indicating the appetite for satellite-delivered programming.
However, informal operators charge roughly 60 percent less for providing the service than
formal operators do.
