An emergency council of some 94 cable stations originally threatened to halt broadcasts of all terrestrial channels since Friday. With related talks still underway, they first targeted KBS, the state-run channel, it said.

“Even though KBS is a public broadcasting station operated by people’s fees, it is demanding that we pay for using their programs. That’s why we stopped its broadcast,” said an official of the Korea Cable Television and Telecommunications Association.

About 15 million households, or 75 percent of total cable subscribers, could not watch one of the most popular channels from Monday afternoon despite a few exceptions in some regions.

The Korea Communications Commission held an emergency meeting to discuss follow-up measures including imposing business suspension on participating cable operators.

Since 2007, cable TVs have continued negotiations on retransmission fees for using the programs of the three terrestrial broadcasters.

Channels claim that it is very natural for cable TV operators to pay to use programs, while cable stations resist saying that they have contributed to reducing the shadow areas of TV coverage that led to more advertisement profits for broadcasters.

Even though they recently agreed on 100 won ($0.08) per subscriber as the upper limit at the end of last year, they remain at odds over whether to charge the fees for all subscribers or only new subscribers.

Cable operators halted high-definition broadcasts for eight days in November, affecting an estimated 7.7 million households that watched the programs in lower-quality standard definition.

By Lee Ji-yoon (jylee@heraldcorp.com)