Chunghwa Telecom Co (中華電信), Taiwan’s largest phone operator, predicts subscribers to its online TV service will rise about 20 percent this month as users sign up to watch the Olympic Games, bolstering Internet revenue.
“More coverage is the key issue because we are offering more channels than normal TV,” Cheng Ching-ming, director of interactive multimedia at Chunghwa, said in a telephone interview from Taipei.
Chunghwa offers movies, TV programs and broadcasts of the Olympics over the Internet for NT$89 (US$2.90) per month as part of its multimedia-on-demand service. The Taipei-based company estimates the number of users of the service will climb to 600,000 by Aug. 30, from about 500,000 at the end of last month, Cheng said.
About 190,000 Chunghwa users watched the opening ceremony of the Games live on Friday, more than double the average 90,000 for its most-popular channels before the telecast, he said.
The company is showing the Games through an agreement with Elta Technology Co (愛爾達科技), which has exclusive Internet coverage rights in Taiwan and five channels broadcasting the event.
Chunghwa, 36 percent owned by the Ministry of Transportation and Communications, last month sold a 32 percent stake in Elta to an unidentified buyer to comply with regulations preventing government enterprises from owning broadcasting firms.
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
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
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],”
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts