A nationwide communications group is to be launched before the end of the year to take charge of the unification of China's wireless, cable and satellite broadcasting services.
The new company will work to significantly upgrade the country's broadcasting capability, said Zhang Haitao, vice-director of the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT). Speaking at yesterday's opening ceremony of China Cable Broadcasting Network 2001, this year's version of this annual series of exhibitions, he said the Beijing-based group would be valued at more than 10 billion yuan (US$1.2 billion) and would have branches in all the country's provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities.
It will be a State-owned enterprise and SARFT will hold a controlling stake of at least 51 per cent.
The company will not be open to private or foreign investment, although other State-owned enterprises will be able to hold its shares.
Supervised by SARFT, it will bring local TV, cable and radio broadcasting stations into one conglomerate, and is expected to give strong competition to the telecom sector.
At present, the development of the broadcasting communications sector is far behind that of the telecom industry, Zhang said.
The development of the broadcasting business has slowed down in recent years, with shrinking revenues, said the official.
He said the sector relied too much on advertising, wasting much of its valuable network time.
The cable broadcasting network, which was 3 million kilometres of line and reaches more than 80 million families, should be better utilized, he said.
Having a much broader bandwidth, providing services such as Internet access, video-on-demand and interactive shopping, the cable network has the capability of reaching far more people than telecom networks.
To provide such integrated services, SARFT is transforming the one-way cable broadcasting network into two-way communications networks which will enable subscribers to not only receive TV programs but also send information back and get order products and services.
Some local cable broadcasting companies, which have started trial operations offering Internet access via the cable network, have received a warm welcome from customers.
(People's Daily 03/22/2001)
