Taiwan has chosen to support local streaming content with money rather than mandates. The budget fight reported by the Taipei Times on August 17, 2026 shows what that choice costs when the money becomes a political target.
What the legislature cut
The opposition-controlled Legislative Yuan passed the 2026 central government budget on August 14, a record 266 days late, at NT$2.9869 trillion, according to Focus Taiwan. Media policy and publicity budgets were cut 50 percent except for legally required spending.
The Taipei Times reported that the Ministry of Culture lost roughly NT$1 billion. That includes NT$200 million from TaiwanPlus, NT$21.85 million from the Public Television Service, and NT$47.38 million from the ministry's publicity budget, which was cut for a second straight year (last year's cut was NT$59.43 million). Culture Minister Li Yuan invoked the line that to destroy a people, one first destroys its culture. KMT legislator Lo Chih-chiang countered that TaiwanPlus was set to receive nearly NT$10 billion over eight years with "lackluster" results.
The case for the critics
The critics have a real argument. A state-funded platform that cannot show audience results after nearly NT$10 billion invites scrutiny, and legislative oversight of spending is a normal function of a parliament. If a channel underperforms, asking why is not censorship. A Taipei Times editorial noted that the cuts were part of NT$48 billion in reductions across agencies, so this was not aimed at culture alone.
The question is what follows from that oversight. A flat cut to an English-language outreach service says little about which content works, and it lands on a sector that has been told to expect growth.
Subsidies without a rulebook
On November 4, 2025, the Ministry of Culture announced NT$30 billion over five years for audiovisual content, alongside an online distribution platform with a target of 1 billion streaming views a year, Señal News reported. That report did not mention any quota or OTT regulation. The approach is incentive-based, and details such as governance of the portal were still being worked out.
Taiwan did try a regulatory route. The National Communications Commission drafted an Internet Audiovisual Service Management Act in 2020. In May 2022 it approved a revised framework, the Taipei Times reported. Large registered operators, including Netflix, would have had to commit to airing or producing content aimed at Taiwanese audiences, and the NCC was weighing a requirement that overseas operators work with local providers. The subscriber threshold was never fixed. Local operators had argued that the earlier draft punished them rather than tackling piracy, and the bill stalled. It never became law.
So Taiwan today has neither a binding local-content obligation on global streamers nor a funding stream insulated from annual politics.
Why this matters for a pro-innovation approach
We would not want Taiwan to import a rigid quota. Fixed percentage quotas tend to reward volume over quality and can push platforms to buy cheap compliance content. The 2022 draft was notably softer, a commitment to air or produce local content with no percentage, which is the more proportionate design. But abandoning any framework means all policy weight falls on appropriations. Appropriations are the least predictable lever, as this year's 266-day delay and the cuts show.
A producer deciding whether to greenlight a Taiwanese series needs to know whether the NT$30 billion fund will be there in year three. Freezes and second-year publicity cuts make that harder to answer. Predictable rules cost the state less than repeated rescues, and they do not depend on which party controls the legislature.
What a proportionate fix looks like
- Ring-fence multi-year content funding where the law allows, so production commitments are not hostage to each annual budget cycle.
- Publish performance metrics for TaiwanPlus and the new platform. That answers the KMT's fair question with data instead of slogans and gives defenders something to point to.
- Revisit a light-touch registration and reporting regime for large streamers, based on the 2022 framework: disclosure of local-content spending, not percentage quotas.
- Keep user-generated-content platforms out of scope, as the 2022 framework did, to protect open-internet expression.
The bottom line
Subsidy-only policy is not wrong. It avoids the trade-distortion and compliance costs of quotas. But it works only if the subsidy is dependable and measured. Taiwan's legislature and government are now fighting over both, while the regulatory alternative sits shelved. Both sides would be better served by evidence on what TaiwanPlus and the content fund deliver, and by a modest, transparent framework that does not depend on a budget vote.