Colombia. Legal restrictions on community television, on the maximum number of closed television channels and subscribers, are the main factors affecting the development and competition of these cable systems.
There are many requests that their representatives have made to the Colombian government, but they have achieved little. According to Eduardo Noriega, representative of the National Council of Community Television, the last response of the MINISTER of ICTs, Diego Molano, was serious.
"The Minister says that Community TV should migrate to commercial subscription television system taking advantage of ongoing tenders, but that is impossible because the law does not allow community systems to have commercial purposes. What they need to do is remove those restrictions. That answer has no legal or conceptual future," said Eduardo Noriega.
He added that what they want is to end the community television model. "The government indicates that the restrictions cannot be modified because they were included in the Free Trade Agreement signed with the United States, but no FTA can put this type of rules."
Finally, Eduardo Noriega, said that the spirit of the FTAs is to open markets, but that now they want citizens to restrict their markets on community TV, but that they are not taking into account that the rules included in the FTA with the United States only apply to commercial cable operators.
Faced with this situation, union leaders of the community television systems supported Noriega's pronouncement. Sergio Restrepo, director of Expo ComuTV, said that "since community television is a unique model that only exists in Colombia, there is no way to compare it and the existing law we did not have to invent, that's why it has big problems."
