TV5, the country’s third biggest television network, has filed a complaint against the cable television unit of bigger rival ABS-CBN Corp. for failing to air TV5’s signal for more than two and a half hours last month.
In a statement, TV5 said it had filed a complaint in the National Telecommunications Commission against SkyCable for the incident that occurred on Dec. 13, 2014, adding that the issue had affected TV5’s ratings.
TV5, a unit of Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co., added in its statement that “there was also a period during this erratic airing when TV5 on SkyCable fluctuated and was interchanged with AksyonTV.”
“On Dec. 13, 2014, SkyCable failed to carry the TV5 signal for over two and a half hours, adversely affecting our channel viewership and depriving the public of an important news and entertainment source,” TV5 head of programming Dan de Padua said in the statement.
Spokespersons from the NTC and Skycable did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
TV5 included in its statement media monitoring records that, it said, came from The Neilsen Co. (Philippines) Inc. It noted that the third-party research firm had recorded TV5’s signal loss on Skycable.
“The TV Events team confirmed that there was indeed a signal loss to TV5 on our Sky Cable recordings. Per standard procedure, our TV Events team used a backup recording using free-to-air sources to encode the missed airings,” TV5 said.
Total off-air time was from “14:10:20 to 16:47:55 or 2 hours, 37 minutes and 35 seconds,” TV5 added.
The statement quoted the Nielsen report as stating, “there were 10 other free-to-air channels that we monitor that were affected by the loss of signal, but they were only off air by 7 minutes,” the statement showed.
These channels were NBN, 9TV, GNTV, ABS-CBN SPORTS+ACTION, RJTV, 9TV, IBC, ABS-CBN, GMA, and Aksyon TV.”
A spokesperson from Nielsen could not immediately be reached for comment.