New Chinese TV channels approved

CRTC approved four new digital Chinese TV channels yesterday (decisions here, here, here and here), which could mean Canada's Chinese TV market would be getting more competitive. Fairchild TV does not rule out that their advertising sales might be affected. It plans to increase local production.

The four "specialty programming" digital channels will be aired nationally. They are:

1. Chinese movie channel; 80% of content must be movies
2. Chinese news channel; 80% of content must be news or news-related productions
3. Chinese/Taiwan TV; 90% of content in Mandarin or Taiwanese
4. Chinese/Cantonese home TV channel; 90% of content in Cantonese

CRTC also approved that customers subscribing to these channels do not need to be FTV's subscribers. The licenses were given to the Ethnic Channels Group.

Ethnic Channels CEO and president Slava Levin said the news channel would include local productions, but it's not decided if the movie channel would do so. He noted that while his channels are "specialty channels", they did not compete directly with FTV, which was a "general interest" channel.

Levin said Ethnic Channels was a Canadian company. It has published 11 TV channels in two years. It has worked with Rogers, Bell Express Vu, Telus TV in Vancouver and VDN in Montreal.

He declined to disclose who the partners were for the new Chinese channels.

Joe Chan, president of FTV, said they would pumped up more local news/features production. He's not sure how much interest North American Chinese viewers would have on a 24-hour Chinese news channel.

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ethnic, TV, news, movie, Canada, Chinese, media, advertising, broadcasting, CRTC