China will provide low-interest loans to cable companies to convert 100 million urban households to digital television by 2008, a government official said.
The goal is to have all 380 million households in China on digital technology by 2015, providing sharper pictures and access to interactive services such as home shopping. About 280,000 households nationwide are now digital.
Skyworth and other digital TV makers including Samsung Electronics Co and Sony Corp are set to benefit from the new government policy, as will overseas broadcasters such as News Corp and Viacom Inc, which will have access to what was a restricted market. Viacom formed a production venture with Shanghai Media Group in April to make children's programming.
immediate benefits
"The policy has just been put in place but we already are benefiting," said Maggie Mak, investor relations manager of Hong Kong-listed digital TV maker Skyworth Digital Holdings, which makes TV sets in neighboring Shenzhen. "This national plan will help increase our sales."
Skyworth sold 330,000 digital TV sets last year and 80,000 set-top boxes for receiving digital signals from cable systems.
The company won a contract to supply China with set-top boxes and its shares shot up 8.3 percent in February after the announcement. Skyworth also makes sets for Korea's LG Electronics and Japan's Mitsubishi Electric Corp.
"We want to be a digital society," Wang Xiaojie, director-general in charge of digital TV at the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television, said in an interview in Beijing. "We want to phase out all analog and convert to digital by 2015. We are going to have to fund some of the technology required."
set-top boxes needed
The initial plan is to convert the 100 million urban households now on cable to digital television by 2008, Wang said. That would require at least US$7 billion worth of set-top boxes, based on the current cost of digital set-top box equipment.
"Subsidizing digital is a good investment for the state," said Jamie Davis, president of Star China, part of News Corp's China television unit. "Television has the potential to create jobs, wealth, tax revenue, and a better lifestyle for people here."
Digital television delivers better visual quality by encoding its signal as zeroes and ones -- the same digital code used in computers. The technology also allows for data transmission and the simultaneous broadcast of multiple channels, enabling interactive service such as pay-per-view movies, home shopping and stock trading.
"You'll see all kinds of entertainment on pay-digital TV," said Wang. "You'll see fishing channels, health channels, women's channels, children's channels. The only thing we don't allow is adult content, nudity or politically sensitive information. But everything else will be available on pay TV."
China is among the world's top five television markets and second in Asia behind Japan in terms of advertising.
Spending on ads, before discounts and based on published rates, increased 45 percent in 2003 to US$45 billion, according to New York-based market researcher Nielsen Media Research.
China is far less digitized than more developed TV markets.
The US is already 99 percent digitized, while Japan is 80 percent digitized, according to Wang. "We're just beginning the process here in China," she said.
The subsidized rollout follows incentives offered by digital broadcasters in the UK, Taiwan and other markets as they attempt to develop new audiences for their services.
60 new stations
China's TV regulator approved 40 digital pay-TV channels last year, Wang said. Sixty more will be approved in the next two weeks, she said. The loans will be made through China Development Bank.
State-owned China Central Television, which has 15 channels, began operating six digital pay-TV channels last week. Many local Chinese TV stations also are getting into the new technology.
"Digital TV needs pay television and pay television needs digital television," said Sun Yusheng, president of CCTV's digital TV unit.
DVN, which has 46 percent of the set-box market in China now, is working with Qingdao Cable Co. in eastern China to develop a platform for value-added services, including games and entertainment, real-time information for stocks and other data.
"The concept is to create a new business model, with value-added services," said Terry Lui, DVN chief executive.
The Chinese government last year announced that Qingdao is the key city for the digital conversion. The government also picked 48 other cities for conversion.
e-government platform
Digital TV is priority for the Chinese government because it offers officials the opportunity to implement a direct information channel, or so-called e-government.
The government chose digital TV as an e-government platform rather than the Internet because China's personal computer penetration rate is so low. Only 7 percent of Chinese households have personal computers, while 100 percent have TV sets.
"In some communities, there is even household TV ratio of 1.5, which means some households have two TV sets or more," said Wang. "This is why we picked digital TV as a direct channel between government and the people, rather than the Internet."
Two-thirds of China's population lives in rural, sometimes remote, areas that don't have access to cable and will have to receive digital TV from satellite dishes or digital broadcasts by local TV stations.
"This will take a massive effort as the nation is so huge and the number of households so many," Wang said. Helping farmers pay for expensive digital TV sets is the only solution, she said.
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
RECORD-BREAKING: TSMC’s net profit last quarter beat market expectations by expanding 8.9% and it was the best first-quarter profit in the chipmaker’s history Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), which counts Nvidia Corp as a key customer, yesterday said that artificial intelligence (AI) server chip revenue is set to more than double this year from last year amid rising demand. The chipmaker expects the growth momentum to continue in the next five years with an annual compound growth rate of 50 percent, TSMC chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家) told investors yesterday. By 2028, AI chips’ contribution to revenue would climb to about 20 percent from a percentage in the low teens, Wei said. “Almost all the AI innovators are working with TSMC to address the
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”