 |
| Chinese Internet TV Becomes Premium Financial Video |
|
|
|
|
China's largest internet TV portal, UUSee.com, recently established a JV with Qianlong Software, China's leading share trading software company, to launch video windows on Qianlong's share trading interface. The new product has delivered dramatic traffic increases for UUSee, as well as high advertising sales.
According to UUSee, its website currently has 500,000 visitors per day and as high as 50,000 visitors online at any given time. UUSee had registered US$10 million advertising sales in 2007, up 50% from previous comparable period, and the company achieved breakeven at the end of 2007.
Industry analysts suggested that in the near future, video-based financial programs will be equally sharing the financial news market with text-based financial news. But in a longer term, as more and more financial contents move to video format, significant investment opportunities will surface in this sector.
Win-win for UUSee and Qianlong
In terms of real-time sharemarket monitoring, the cooperation between Qianlong and UUSee, whose competitive advantage lies in combing TV and internet, has created a new model for producing financial video programs. Under the deal, UUSee's video windows (user terminal) have been embedded into the bottom-right corner of Qianlong's latest sharemarket software, enabling Qianlong users to view multiple TV channels while using the software. |
|
|
|
|
|
Vice-CEO of UUSee, Mr Xu Haoyu, commented that "This is a win-win deal, which has lifted both companies' value propositions." For Qianlong users, they can now receive richer and livelier information, hence more value added. And for UUSee, it can now repackage its contents for defined groups of viewers, enabling advertisers to place advertisements more accurately according to different user groups. So it could be indeed a win-win deal.
Mr Song Liqun, Managing Director of Shanghai Qianlong Network Technology, which owns the software, said that the marriage between securities trading software providers and new media such as internet TV, could not only provide a new channel for users to receive timely financial information, but could also create a channel for the dissemination of financial information. Therefore investors can now control all the information on a single platform, instead of "a computer on the left side and a TV on the right side".
Internet TV ≠ Online video
UUSee is an internet TV media based on point-to-point (P2P) technology, which is different from those so-called online video websites, such as YouTube. Most online video websites in China are user-generated-contents website, which means users upload their own video contents onto the website. On the other hand, UUSee's programs are mostly sourced from television stations and filming institutions, whose contents have obtained regulatory approvals and are legally allowed to broadcast to the public. In order to attract advertisements, all the contents on UUSee are free of charge.
As a new media, UUSee has singed up more than 80 television stations in China, spanning across channels such as movie, television drama, sports, finance and fashion. According to Mr Xu, about 40% of UUSee's operating costs belong to copyright purchase.
Value of internet TVs
Since 2007, P2P technology-based internet TV media in China as attracted impressive interests from venture capitalists. As Web 2.0 technology developing and bandwidth availability expanding in China, the online video sector, especially live broadcasting and video-on-demand enabled internet TVs, has grown significantly in a short time period. Meanwhile, the improvement in contents and profitability of internet TV websites in 2007 has brought large impacts on traditional TVs, internet news portals and the DVD industry.
UUSee obtained its first venture capital (VC) funding of US$10 million in 2005 and it second VC funding of US$23.5 million in 2007. It is reported that the German VC firm Burda Digital is also considering investing in UUSee. Analysts have predicted that in the long term, internet TVs will become an arch-viral to traditional TVs and first generation internet portals for advertising sales.
Source: www.cs.com.cn
|
|
| < Prev |
|---|
