Taiwan Mobile Co (台灣大哥大), the nation’s No. 2 telecoms carrier, yesterday unveiled a new digital Internet TV service and other products that utilize convergent telecoms technologies, allowing subscribers to access digital content via the Web from their mobile phones or living rooms.
These services put Taiwan Mobile in direct competition in the Internet TV market with the nation’s biggest communications company Chunghwa Telecom Co (中華電信). Chunghwa Telecom has more than 800,000 subscribers to its multimedia-on-demand (MOD) services that are carried over the Internet.
Taiwan Mobile’s new Internet TV service will be available in February and local cable TV system operator Kbro Co Inc (凱擘), owned by Taiwan’s Tsai family, which also holds a major stake in Taiwan Mobile, plans to launch the service in the second quarter of next year at the earliest, the firm said.
The Tsai family bought an 80 percent stake in Kbro for NT$36 billion (US$1.22 billion) from private equity fund Carlyle Group after Taiwan Mobile’s bid for Kbro failed to obtain the approval of the nation’s telecoms regulator.
Kbro expects the combined subscription for its Internet TV services to double, or even triple, to between 300,000 and 500,000 users next year from this year, Kbro chairman James Jeng (鄭俊卿) told reporters.
Before being choosen to be Kbro chairman last week, Jeng was president of Taiwan Fixed Networks Media (台固媒體), a fixed-line affiliate of Taiwan Mobile.
“This time, we will offer a different Internet TV service for people’s living rooms, rather than their mobile, tablet or other handheld devices,” Jeng said.
Despite the significant increase in subscribers, Taiwan Mobile vice president Cliff Lai (賴弦五) said he did not expect the new business to generate any significant contribution to revenue next year.
“It likely won’t be until 2012 that we see a meaningful contribution,” Lai said.
To compete with Chunghwa Telecom, Taiwan Mobile would not rule out the possibility of coaxing the nation’s major multi-system operators of cable televisions, including China Network Systems Co (中嘉網路), to join the company’s Internet TV platform, Lai said.
Taiwan’s rapidly aging population is fueling a sharp increase in homes occupied solely by elderly people, a trend that is reshaping the nation’s housing market and social fabric, real-estate brokers said yesterday. About 850,000 residences were occupied by elderly people in the first quarter, including 655,000 that housed only one resident, the Ministry of the Interior said. The figures have nearly doubled from a decade earlier, Great Home Realty Co (大家房屋) said, as people aged 65 and older now make up 20.8 percent of the population. “The so-called silver tsunami represents more than just a demographic shift — it could fundamentally redefine the
The US government on Wednesday sanctioned more than two dozen companies in China, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates, including offshoots of a US chip firm, accusing the businesses of providing illicit support to Iran’s military or proxies. The US Department of Commerce included two subsidiaries of US-based chip distributor Arrow Electronics Inc (艾睿電子) on its so-called entity list published on the federal register for facilitating purchases by Iran’s proxies of US tech. Arrow spokesman John Hourigan said that the subsidiaries have been operating in full compliance with US export control regulations and his company is discussing with the US Bureau of
Taiwan’s foreign exchange reserves hit a record high at the end of last month, surpassing the US$600 billion mark for the first time, the central bank said yesterday. Last month, the country’s foreign exchange reserves rose US$5.51 billion from a month earlier to reach US$602.94 billion due to an increase in returns from the central bank’s portfolio management, the movement of other foreign currencies in the portfolio against the US dollar and the bank’s efforts to smooth the volatility of the New Taiwan dollar. Department of Foreign Exchange Director-General Eugene Tsai (蔡炯民)said a rate cut cycle launched by the US Federal Reserve
Businesses across the global semiconductor supply chain are bracing themselves for disruptions from an escalating trade war, after China imposed curbs on rare earth mineral exports and the US responded with additional tariffs and restrictions on software sales to the Asian nation. China’s restrictions, the most targeted move yet to limit supplies of rare earth materials, represent the first major attempt by Beijing to exercise long-arm jurisdiction over foreign companies to target the semiconductor industry, threatening to stall the chips powering the artificial intelligence (AI) boom. They prompted US President Donald Trump on Friday to announce that he would impose an additional
RSS