Chunghwa Telecom Co (中華電信) yesterday said its number of Internet TV subscribers has accelerated over the past month, boding well for the nation’s largest telecom company’s aim to reach 2 million users by the end of the year.
In one month, the company has garnered more than 40,000 new subscribers for its multimedia-on-demand (MOD) services, company chairman David Cheng (鄭優) told reporters on the sidelines of the World Congress on Information Technology in Taipei,
The MOD cancelation rate has been halved, he said.
Photo: CNA
“We expected a drop in MOD subscriptions following the end of the Taipei Summer Universade on August 30, but it did not happen,” Cheng said.
The Universade helped boost MOD subscriptions, he said, crediting the performance of Taiwan’s athletes.
Cheng also contributed the fast growth in MOD subscriptions to the popularity of film director Wu Nien-jen (吳念真), who was hired to endorse the MOD service.
The new single TV plan offer has also gained traction and helped boost subscriptions, Cheng said.
Chunghwa Telecom has 1.4 million MOD users, he said.
Cheng made it his priority to turn around the money-losing MOD since taking the reins in December last year.
The MOD unit has been running at a loss for 13 years due to lack of appealing programs, with accumulated losses of NT$31.5 billion (US$1.05 billion), company data showed.
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
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],”
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
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day