CCTV's efforts can't dominate Internet video

• Source: Global Times
• [22:49 January 11 2010]
• Comments

Illustration: Liu Rui

By Zhang Yizhong 
 
Last week, in a high profile launch event, China's national network television (CNTV), an Internet venture owned by China Central Television (CCTV), began to operate online.
 
Within days servers of the website were overloaded by the huge waves of visitors coming in for free access to on-demand TV programs and high definition movies.
 
As a result of the overwhelming traffic, CNTV's video services became semi-paralyzed in parts of the country.
 
On the first day of its official operation, I visited the CNTV site to check out for myself the "national team" of Internet video. After hopping back and forth between the channels and playing with Bugu (literally meaning cuckoo), a P2P powered live streaming client, for hours, I got a mixed impression of the nascent multi-media portal.
 
The Web design appeared unimpressive, the organization of its interface was inconvenient, quite a few subchannels and functions were still under construction, and the uncontrollably volatile progress bar of its video playback drove me nuts.
 
Nonetheless, backed by finance and content resources from CCTV, CNTV set sail with advantages unmatched by its private competitors. Video images are high in resolution, sharp in contrast and crisp in color.
 
Even better, they start playing right away, without buffering, and the content collection is huge. There are 1,000 hours from national and provincial satellite channels live streamed and added to the library every day. Over 400,000 hours of archives from CCTV depository will be added. Even better, all of this doesn't cost a dime.
 
In fact, CNTV is a unique behemoth that has its tentacles in Internet TV service, on-demand video streaming and user-generated video sharing, each of them enough by themselves to fl oat a NASDAQ listed company. With its grand framework outlined in the baby version, CNTV seems poised to take over the nation's online video industry. However, things aren't that simple!
 
Bugu, the site's IPTV service, delivers high quality, real-time TV channels over the Internet onto computer screens for free in an attempt to attract netizens. The recent outage due to the massive hits to the P2P network exemplifi es its popularity, but it's far too early to say CNTV is winning back the generation of Web surfers.

Netizens, who, like me, have thrown away their remotes, don't just cling to computers for the clicking sound that mice make, but for things that TV failed to provide.