NOW lines up eight partners for pay service Deal fails to spell out future of iTV
2001-08-08
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Pacific Century CyberWorks has finally announced the launch of its interactive services, forging partnerships with a group of content providers.
Hong Kong's dominant Internet and telecoms operator yesterday said it agreed with eight companies to offer interactive info-tainment services to broadband Internet users.
The content partners of NOW.com.hk include Television Broadcasts' online unit TVB.com; Commercial Radio, Intertainer (Asia); movie distributor Mei Ah Entertainment Group and ERA Information & Entertainment; music provider HMV and eolasia.com; and online games provider Billybala iGame.
Media tycoon Jimmy Lai Chee-ying's Next Media was not on the list as the two parties failed to reach agreement.
PCCW has reversed its plan to produce original content for its NOW and Netvigator portals, available free on the two Web sites. It is now using what chairman Richard Li Tzar-kai had called a "walled-garden concept", where only paying subscribers to iTV and Netvigator Ultraline would have been able to view content aggregated from the new partners.
However, Dominic Leung Tak-sing, executive vice-president of Internet services at Interactive Multimedia Services (iTV), said the content, to be launched in mid-September, would be available only to PCCW broadband Internet users and not to existing iTV users.
Mr Leung said NOW and iTV would continue to operate as separate services, although they had been sharing content.
PCCW's original plan to provide convergence TV services to households in the Greater China region through set-top boxes also was not now on the agenda, said spearhead of the project Winnie Yu, who is chief executive of PCC Skyhorse - a joint venture between PCCW and Commercial Radio.
"The world of technology is changing very fast," said Ms Yu. "What we originally planned two years ago had already changed."
PCCW had linked with leading mainland computer maker Legend Holdings to produce set-top boxes in China, but the plan has yet to materialise.
Mr Leung said PCCW had invested HK$ 50 million in building the platform. The total investment for the NOW.com.hk services is expected to be HK$ 80 million in three years.
By charging a monthly fee of HK$ 30 on top of Netvigator's broadband Internet services, PCCW was expecting to attract 350,000 subscribers by the end of 2003, said Mr Leung. The firm is targeted to break even by then.
Analysts said the media partnerships that PCCW announced yesterday was nothing more than aggregating contents which could hardly be value-creating.
"It is merely part of the process of sub-contracting contents, which is not a big deal," said Stephen Leung, an analyst at CLSA.
He said even if all of PCCW's broadband subscribers took on the add-on content service at HK$ 30 per month, which is about 10 per cent of the existing access charge, it would contribute less than HK$ 100 million in annual turnover.
A more important issue, which was not addressed yesterday, was the strategy for the pay-TV service iTV, which originally was thought to be merging with NOW.
Meanwhile, Telecom Directories, a wholly owned subsidiary of PCCW, has linked with China Unicom's Yellow Pages in a cross-selling agreement for the development of the mainland directory business.
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