Softbank Corp, Japan's second biggest provider of high-speed Internet services, is set to form a joint venture with Taiwanese content service providers in the near term to tap onto the booming Internet TV market, its founder said yesterday.
"TV stations and broadcasting companies here create good content which is limited to Taiwanese viewers.
Now with Internet TV, they can offer programs to 1 billion Internet users around the globe, which will help create a superstar industry," Masayoshi Son told reporters after delivering a speech in Taipei yesterday.
content on demand
Its Internet TV platform, called TV Bank, will enable viewers to search for and watch content such as foreign films over broadband connections.
The Japanese Internet giant is in discussion with local companies, including TV stations, digital content providers, record companies, broadcasting firms and production houses for possible cooperation. But Son decline to reveal further details.
According to Chinese-language newspapers, Taiwan Television Enterprise Ltd (
The service, which will launch in Japan next spring, will have strategic bases in Tokyo, Taipei, Beijing, Shanghai and Seoul, the paper said.
"The preliminary investments in Taiwan will be small, but it will gradually increase over time," Son said.
He added that Softbank will serve as the hub of Internet TV, and help distribute Taiwanese content to the rest of the world, while bringing overseas content to local viewers.
"With its highly mature broadband infrastructure, Asia will play the main role in the Internet TV era," Son told an audience in a speech given in conjunction with the 2005 Taiwan International Film & TV Expo.
To make the TV Bank platform work, offering free content on an advertisement-based model will be a start, he said, adding that the pay-per-view model will follow afterward as a way of increasing revenues.
Conservative companies which focus only on a domestic audience will not be able to succeed in a blossoming global broadband era, said Son, who has been dubbed the "Bill Gates of the East."
growing empire
Son, who is also the chief executive of Softbank, founded the company in 1981.
Its major businesses include the largest domestic portal Yahoo Japan, in which it owns a 42 percent stake, and Yahoo BB, the No. 2 broadband service in Japan, which was launched in 2001.
In addition to promoting the fixed telephone service of Japan Telecom Co, which it acquired in September last year, Softbank was granted a third-generation mobile network license by the Japanese government on Thursday, which will allow it to enter the mobile phone sector.
Softbank said on Thursday that its group operating revenues in the third quarter grew 72.1 percent from a year earlier to ?522.79 billion (US$4.42 billion), primarily due to its acquisition of Japan Telecom.
It chalked up a group operating profit of ?4.40 billion in the first half of this fiscal year, the first half-year profit in four-and-a-half years, as subscribers to the Yahoo BB increased steadily.
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