Viacom, the world's biggest media company by market value, and Rupert Murdoch's News Corp are battling similar restrictions to their television businesses in China to those faced by AOL.
While Viacom's MTV music network has aired via satellite in China since the mid-1990s, it's limited to select hotels and foreign housing compounds. Viacom joined News Corp and AOL Time Warner this year in broadcasting to about 2 million cable-TV viewers in Guangdong province, MTV International president Bill Roedy said.
"We are not looking to make huge bundles of money from China tomorrow," Roedy said in an interview. "It is a long-term play."
News Corp set up a Mandarin-language channel in Guangdong last year and broadcasts its Star Group Ltd English-language programs, ESPN and the National Geographic Channel to some hotels and to residences and office buildings housing foreigners.
Both Viacom's Roedy and AOL's Marcopoto say China is a market they can't afford to ignore. The country's number of Internet users is second only to that of the US and has more than doubled in the past two years. China's advertising market, worth about US$5 billion in 2001, expanded last year even as the global ad market shrank, according to Access Asia, a market researcher.
AOL Time Warner said it doesn't expect to reap profits from that growth soon -- especially with the English-language content that drives its profit elsewhere.
"This is all still very early days," Marcopoto said. "As an international company, you've got to be in Chinese-language television if you're going to be a player in the next 10 to 25 years."
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