Chunghwa Telecom Co (CHT, 中華電信), the nation’s largest telecom operator, yesterday said it has signed an agreement with US video streaming giant Netflix Inc to offer ultra-high-definition, or 4K, content for its Internet TV subscribers by February at the earliest.
Chunghwa Telecom announced the tie-up at a ceremony to celebrate the company reaching its target of 2 million subscribers.
That means its media-on-demand (MOD) business has reached an economic scale and is finally on track to turn a profit.
“We hope the MOD would eke out a profit in the second half of next year,” Chunghwa Telecom chairman David Cheng (鄭優) told reporters.
Turning around the video streaming and Internet TV business has been a priority since Cheng took office in 2016.
The MOD business has lost NT$31.5 billion over the past 13 years.
The company has made the “impossible mission possible” by adding 700,000 new subscribers in more than a year, Cheng said.
It began to see substantial subscriber gains in summer when it won exclusive rights to air the FIFA World Cup.
“Our next step is to further enhance our content. The collaboration with Netflix is an important part of this effort,” Cheng said.
“We believe the introduction of Netflix content would help boost the MOD subscriber number, given its rich content library,” he said.
Longer term, the two companies could deepen their cooperation to produce original titles together, Cheng said.
“It is natural to take that step, but as of now, our cooperation is still in the initial stage,” he said. “This is a win-win situation.”
The collaboration with Chunghwa Telecom gives Netflix, which has more than 130 million subscribers worldwide, access to MOD’s viewer base.
With new titles from Netflix and new value-added services to come online next year, Chunghwa Telecom has set an “aggressive target” of increasing MOD’s average revenue per user (ARPU) by 20 percent, Kao Wu-sung (高武松), vice president of Chunghwa Telecom’s Digital Convergence Business Department, told reporters.
Increasing advertisement income would also provide a boost to ARPU, Kao said.
Chunghwa Telecom is developing a 4K set-top box supporting Netflix’s standard and technology, Kao said. That would give MOD subscribers a better viewing experience than users streaming Netflix on smartphones or laptops, Kao said.
Cheng again urged the government to relax rules to allow Chunghwa Telecom to compete with its local rivals in a fair way.
The company is only allowed to stream movies, TV shows and other content from channel operators. It is banned from creating its own streaming packages.
Cheng said those restrictions are major obstacles to MOD making a profit.
Local rivals with half the size of MOD’s subscriber base have been making generous profits, while the MOD is still making losses, he said.
Commenting on the Ministry of Culture calling on Chunghwa Telecom to create a “national team” in the over-the-top (OTT) video market, Cheng said the company would seriously consider it.
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
New apartments in Taiwan’s major cities are getting smaller, while old apartments are increasingly occupied by older people, many of whom live alone, government data showed. The phenomenon has to do with sharpening unaffordable property prices and an aging population, property brokers said. Apartments with one bedroom that are two years old or older have gained a noticeable presence in the nation’s six special municipalities as well as Hsinchu county and city in the past five years, Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房產集團) found, citing data from the government’s real-price transaction platform. In Taipei, apartments with one bedroom accounted for 19 percent of deals last
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