Fubon Corporation's much-debated takeover bid for Kbro, Taiwan's biggest cable TV operator, was finally approved on Wednesday by the official media regulator, NCC. But doubts still persist over the deals potential to result in a monopoly in Taiwan's cable TV market.

The Fair Trade Commission gave conditional approval to the proposed sale of Taiwan's biggest cable TV operator but that the buyout would be restricted to assuage monopoly concerns.

The National Communication Commission (NCC) also gave the deal a greenlight after a long discussion, which delayed the scheduled press conference on Wednesday afternoon by an hour.

While the acquisition deal has raised doubts from the public, the NCC stressed that percentage of digital content of the 12 TV networks under Kbro is around 10.6%, way higher than the average figure of 5% of cable TV nationwide.

Also Da-Fu media has come out with a concrete schedule and funding of 5.2 billion NTD concerning its investment in TV digitalization to help upgrade the development of Taiwan's communications industry and promise to raise the percentage of digital content to 50% by 2015.

This convinced NCC members.

But scholars oppose the deal.

According to Dr. Shih Jun-Ji, research fellow at Academic Sinica, the Fubon group borrows 54 billion NTD from banks for the deal and the promise of digitalization may be in vain.

He worried it may just be another money game taking advantage of the cable TV market, adding that he expressed regret as NCC gave its approval.

Communications scholars worry that NCC passed media buyout with extra conditions and Taiwan may have to pay a big price in the future for the negative impact of centralization of media.

According to NCC, some of the 15 promises of Da-Fu media work toward the lowering of prices as some of the promises are listed in the business plan, which NCC can monitor the implementation through administrative guidance.

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