The cable guy

De la Sota versus free TV

by Marcelo J. García

For the Herald

One — but so far only one — hopeful for the 2015 presidential election has said explicitly that he would seek to repeal the 2009 Broadcasting Law if he won office. Congressman Oscar Aguad of the struggling centrist Radical party might stand next to no chance of winning the presidency or even clinching a nomination but his words are an indication that the media policy debate will continue to have a prominent slot in the country’s political agenda during this midterm electoral year and likely all the way to the next presidential race.

This is also what the governor of Córdoba seems to believe. José Manuel de la Sota has ordered five antennae of the federal government’s free digital television programme installed in his province to be taken down, alleging environmental concerns. De la Sota is a member of the ruling Peronist party but a critic of the administration of President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. He has presidential ambitions.

The distribution of television is the heart of the political confrontation between the government and the country’s largest media conglomerate, Grupo Clarín. The war is about to turn five years old and does not cease to escalate. The government included a cable television chapter in the 2009 Broadcasting Law largely designed to crush Grupo Clarín’s dominance in the sector.

The media giant makes most of its profits from cable. Argentina has the biggest penetration of pay television in Latin America (just over 80 percent) and most of it belongs to cable. Grupo Clarín’s Cablevisión has over 3.5 million subscribers. The Broadcasting Law’s new anti-trust rules establishes a market share cap of 35 percent and the government-controlled AFSCA federal broadcasting authority has calculated Cablevisión control 58 percent of the market via multiple licences. Grupo Clarín contends its share is less than that but also that pay-per-view television elsewhere in the world has similarly concentrated markets. This plot thickens with the fact that the government of late former president Néstor Kirchner had authorized the merger of Grupo Clarín’s cable company Multicanal with Cablevisión in December 2007, a few days before passing on the presidential baton to his wife and a few months before the government and Grupo Clarín parted political company in March, 2008.

De la Sota is making every effort to stick his name in a national political agenda largely dominated by politicos in the Buenos Aires metropolitan area. De la Sota had enjoyed a brief moment of political stardom in late 2002, when he launched a presidential campaign that would soon crash into an opinion poll dead end which forced him to leave the spot for the then virtually unknown Santa Cruz Governor Néstor Kirchner. Kirchner won the presidency in May 2003 and the Kirchner family has been in control since then. De la Sota is hoping to stage a comeback and believes taking sides on one of the government’s most emblematic conflicts can help do the trick.

The TDA (Televisión Digital Abierta) free digital television programme is arguably the most ambitious government media policy. It is not part of the much-debated Broadcasting Law and was instead introduced via presidential decrees, and it includes the decision to adopt along with Brazil a regional version of the Japanese digital TV standard ISDB-T after a decade of cross diplomatic lobbying also involving the US and the European Union. TDA is delivering free television — so far around 20 stations, but more are expected in the future — to Argentines who can get hold of a digital TV decoder. The government has distributed about one million decoders for free. Opponents complain that the government is sending out channels that convey its vision of reality only.

The government of Córdoba did not even try to hide its political take on the matter: “If the national government meets the (environmental) rules, these happy-shiny channels will be back on the air,” said the provincial Cabinet Chief, Oscar González, in an excess of irony. The federal government’s Planning Minister, Julio De Vido, accused the provincial government of “defending the interests of Grupo Clarín.”

The government launched digital television in August 2009 and has invested some three billion pesos in the project so far. Fifty antennae have been installed to cover around 70 percent of the country. The President periodically inaugurates new antennae, which are soon expected to technically cover the entire territory. It is still not clear how many people are actually using the decoder. But the programme can, in the long run, jeopardize the profitable cable television business model — that if people decide to drop 80-some premium television packages for which they are paying monthly fees ranging between 150 and 300 pesos a month.

For would-be presidential contenders like De la Sota or Aguad, it is difficult to grasp the political gains in seeking to repeal legislation or bringing down antennae distributing television to the masses for free. For all the partisan use of Kirchnerite communication policy, a civilized opposition is likely to fare better trying to right the wrong rather than scrapping the right.