BDA - Opportunity through Insight

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Jun 18 2009	Full PDF Version

Cable TV in China: Has Great Potential - & Always Will?

? Cable TV (or Community Access TV, ‘CATV') in China has long been described as a market with great potential. A decade later has seen 100 million new households connected. CATV today reaches 163 million households and an estimated 500 million people, making it by far the world's largest cable ? Yet a decade of subscriber growth leaves CATV in China with great potential. The rapid growth in connected households has not been accompanied by a transformation of CATV from a utility into a profit-oriented service. ? Even after a decade-long push for consolidation, China's CATV sector remains highly fragmented. By 2008, only 13 provincial/central-reporting municipalities had completed or were carrying out full integration of their cable operators out of a total 31 regions. ? Cable operators also need to fund the upgrade from analogue to digital networks and further interactive service. Small cable operators are unable to afford either network investment or interactive content once they have funded the transition to DTV. ? Despite these challenge cable operators continue to carry out network upgrades and interactive service rollouts. In 2009, BDA expects the number of people using cable operators' interactive services to climb to around 3 million, lagging further behind IPTV which we forecast to exceed 4 million. ...

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