China Network Television (CNTV) made its debut today — go download CBOX and start watching free, fully licensed official TV.
CBOX client download link: http://cbox.cntv.cn/
CBox is the most authoritative video client for watching CCTV and dozens of local TV stations from across the country over the internet. Its programming comes from China Network Television, the country’s largest online TV network — a massive library to browse at will, with both live streams and on-demand viewing.
The homepage shows that China Network Television is divided into five channels: News, Sports, Entertainment, iBugou, and iXiyou. Starting in 2010, CNTV will also roll out a series of content services covering movies, TV dramas, documentaries, finance, discovery, health, weather, home, travel, education, ethnic affairs, music and more.
CNTV says that on the video resources front, it will dig deep into CCTV’s 450,000 hours of historical footage and pull together the 1,000-plus hours of video that TV organizations nationwide broadcast every day; at the same time, it will preserve China’s history and culture in every field in video and digital form, build the country’s largest and most influential multimedia database with online video at its core, and turn CNTV into China’s largest legitimate online video distributor. On distribution formats and geography, CNTV says it will bring together web TV, IPTV, mobile TV, mobile media and other media terminals (buses, trains, airlines, subways, buildings, large plaza screens, etc.), build multilingual channels, and deploy global mirror sites to reach internet users in nearly 100 countries and regions across North America, Europe, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Africa and beyond — forming a globalized, multilingual, multi-terminal program distribution system.
According to a relevant person in charge of CNTV’s preparatory office, CNTV is positioned as an approved national comprehensive online video public platform: a globalized, multilingual, multi-terminal, multi-dimensional distribution platform centered on audiovisual interaction and blending the characteristics of the internet with those of television. Earlier reports said CCTV wanted to strengthen its market-oriented operations by bringing in private capital, with the goal of “building an online TV network that fully reflects China’s national level and carries significant international influence, and fulfilling the media responsibility and platform value of ‘delivering the best content to the most users’.”
I’m using the CBOX client right now to watch CCTV. The one thing that bugs me is that it doesn’t support full-screen playback on a secondary monitor; everything else is pretty good.