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S
ince 1989, China has made great
progress in economic development. In
2001, its GDP growth doubled that of
1989. Average yearly growth rate reached
9.3%. Economic output ranked 6
th
in the
world. Broadcasting industry also grew
rapidly after years of development. For the
next 20 years of 21 century, we see the
coming of an important strategic as well as a
new growth opportunity we must seize.
Today, China has 288 radio broadcasting
stations, 432 TV stations, 1,263 county
radio & TV stations. There are 1,777 radio
programmes and 1047 TV programmes
broadcasted annually. There are 70,099
transmission station and re-broadcasting
stations, 2,594 microwave transmission
stations, 34 satellite uplink stations,
520,000 satellite receive and forward
stations. Four satellites are deployed with
29 transponders to forward 126 radio
programmes and 100 TV programmes. The
length of fibre-optics trunk reached 38,000
kilometres. Provincial fibre-optics trunk line
length grew to 100,000 kilometres. Total
length of distributed HFC networks in cities
and counties reached 3 million kilometres
connecting nearly 100 million households.
There are 500 million radios, 450 million
TV sets with 1.202 billion radio listeners
and 1.217 billion TV viewers.
Presently, radio andTVprogrammes aremainly
transmitted through four media: satellite
transmission—radio and TV programmes are
first transmitted through satellite uplinks to
satellites ground receiving antenna receives
signals from the transponders and re-broadcast
the signals to TV and radio re-broadcasting
stations and through the distribute cable
networks and finally deliver them to
subscribers. A satellite transmission use two
frequency band—C and Ku band delivering
both analogue and digital programmes. All
transponders used are leased. By 2005, China
will have completed its satellite transmission
transition from analogue to digital.
Cable already becamemajor deliverymethod for
TVandradioprogrammesatcitiesandprosperous
towns. CCTV TV programmes and radio
programmes through nationwide fibre-optical
trunknetworks aredelivered to fibre-optical trunk
networks of each province (district, city). The
signals are further distributed to each town and
county (through TV station re-broadcasting,
retransmission and cable distribution), and finally
distributed to each household.
In addition to cable delivery method for long
distance TV signal transmission, microwave
repeaters were used in the early days. Presently,
they are still in use in a few regions. The delivery
path is similar to the above except the
distribution from provinces to cities and towns
are through microwave transmission.
Today, cable TV network upgrade is also
going on nationwide. Each major and
medium size cities are moving towards a
target of 500 subscribers per optical node
and upgrade for interactive TV. In the mean
time, we constructed a nationwide digital
cable framework, including national
monitoring network, program providers
(CCTV and provincial TV stations), local
service integration platforms and national
transmission platform is near completion,
which ensures the benefit of different parties
and security of program quality and security.
We have also done many large-scale DTV
broadcasting trials through major domestic
sporting events. This has helped us gained
significant experience in DTV integration
platform, Subscriber Management System
and billing system.
Terrestrial transmission is the only way at the
beginning of TV and radio broadcasting.
Because of possible mutual interference of
adjacent channels, each city is only capable of
transmitting 10 programmes each for TV in
maximum for direct reception.
Facing the challenge—development as thekey
But TV and radio broadcasters in China are
facing increased competition like never before.
Two international channels, China
Entertainment and Star have already entered
broadcastingmarket of China’s southern coastal
area. Network security also is becoming amajor
concern due to some of the recent hacker attacks
on the broadcasting network as well as satellite.
Further improvement is necessary in radio and
TV programmes. China’s current programmes
mainly are basic public channels. Regulations
and policies for more advanced services are
still in the making. More then 10 paid TV
channels including one HDTV movie are
expected to be available by the end of this year.
Cable network is also facing domestic
competition especially from telecom industry.
Although the overall telecom industry has had
the largest “winter” in many parts of the world,
the telecom industry in China has gained rapid
expansion for the past few years and already
had a first-mover advantage over its
broadcasting counter part. China has already
built a fixed line and wireless nationwide
telecom network and realized the network
conversion from manual to automatic and
analogue to digital. Fixed line telephone
subscribers already surpassed 200 million.
Mobile phone subscribers also surpassed 200
million. Internet backbone delivery rate already
exceeds 10Gbytes/sec. SMS messages will
reach 60 billion. Today, out of every four SMS
messages in the world, one is from China.
Recently promoted MMS service, delivery of
photos and short movie clips is already a
reality. Motion video delivery through
handsets is only a matter of time. Sophisticated
content delivery through telecom network is
becoming a reality in the near future. Facing
with such challenges, China broadcasting
industry needs to accelerate its development.
The best approach is to accelerate DTV
development.
China is modernising its infrastructure says Du Bai Chuan,Vice Chief Engineer of the State
Administration for Radio, Film andTelevision, and there’s been great achievement in China
broadcasting industry with more to come
China -
broadcast developing
My tower’s bigger than yours
