China Starts Developing National Online TV Station
Jiefang Daily, 10/12/09
Work on China's new national online TV station has begun in earnest, with programming content coming from the national television station CCTV as well as from provincial-level television stations. The new online television station also plans to attract user-generated content production organizations, and will provide support for the online release of user-generated content.
CCTV.com chief advisor Zhao Lifan says the new efforts represent the first steps for the National Online TV station - including "station-to-web binding," which will provide complete live online feeds of CCTV's 20 channels, as well as video-on-demand (VoD), search, download, and interactive commenting functionality. Once all of these features are in place, the national online TV station will be able to provide an average of 750 hours of content per day. The new station will also use CCTV's more than 400,000 hours of archived programming to establish an "online audiovisual museum."
By 2012, the national online TV station will go global with multiple languages and multiple broadcast methods, and programming available worldwide in English, French, Spanish, Russian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, and Arabic. The station will also form partnerships with other regional stations to produce programming in Mongolian, Tibetan, Uyghur, and other minority languages. Reception of the new network will not be restricted to computers; viewers will also be able to view programming on mobile phones, IPTV terminals, outdoor screens, indoor advertising displays, and on mobile screens in airplanes and on trains.
The State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) revealed that China is already home to 220 mln viewers of online audiovisual programming, or more than 2/3 of all internet users.
Editor's Note: For more background information on this topic, please see "Rumor: National Online TV Station to Be Independent from CCTV.com" MD 2/25/09 issue.
Keywords: online broadcasting Zhao Lifan content Internet programming television CCTV SARFT CCTV.com UGC