China Digital Media Readings for February 15th

• Posted by bbishop
• on February 15th, 2012

• Exclusive: Proview says any ban of iPad exports hard to impose | Reuters- Proview Technology, the Chinese company embroiled in a legal battle with Apple Inc over the iPad name, said on Wednesday that customs authorities had told it that the sheer size of the market and the popularity of iPads would make it difficult to impose a ban.”The customs have told us that it will be difficult to implement a ban because many Chinese consumers love Apple products. The sheer size of the market is very big,” Yang Long-san, chief of Proview Technology (Shenzhen), told Reuters in a telephone interview on Wednesday.

  “We have applied to some local customs for the ban and they’ll report to the headquarters in Beijing.”

• DreamWorks Animation to Unveil Landmark Joint Venture in China (Report) – The Hollywood Reporter – DreamWorks Animation and two state-owned Chinese media companies, Shanghai Media Group and China Media Capital, will unveil a landmark joint venture on Friday, the Financial Times reported.
  The partners will construct a studio facility in Shanghai to develop film, TV and live stage productions for the Chinese market, according to the report.
• Renren Issues Q4 Warning; So Much For The Facebook Bounce – Forbes – The China-based social-networking company said that revenues for the quarter will be within the previous guidance range of $31 million to $33 million, so no issues there. But the company said it now sees a non-GAAP operating loss for the quarter of $15 million to $17 million, due to “increased investments across the company’s business lines,” as well as the consolidation of 56.com, a video-sharing site acquired in October.
• “网恋”背后 陷阱重重-搜狐IT -
• The hollow emptiness in social media numbers – most accounts are fake or empty | ZDNet – Summary: Increasing numbers of studies of social networks point to much smaller numbers of real and active users — sharply reducing the value of the platforms, and social media marketing.
• Analysis & Opinion | Reuters-Dreamworks’ China deal won’t be access all areas- The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are her ownDreamworks may soon get an exclusive ticket to China’s closely guarded film industry. The U.S. studio is likely to announce a joint venture with China-based investors during Vice President Xi Jinping’s visit to California on Feb. 17, a person familiar with the situation has told Breakingviews. It should be a good deal for the creators of “Kung Fu Panda”, but does little to lower the Great Wall around film distribution in the People’s Republic.
• Television Regulations: New Bottle, Same Wine- There is some new content in the regulations issued yesterday, but contrary to the NYT headline, the major issues addressed vis-a-vis foreign content are not new: indeed, they harken back to regulations that have been in force since 1995. From the unpublished manuscript of a guidebook on Chinese television that I co-authored with William Soileau and Jeane-Marie Gescher in 1998, according to regulations then in force:Foreign programming must not be distributed between 6:00 p.m. and 10:00 p.m., although actual enforcement varies according to the broadcaster.

  and

  Foreign programming must not take up more than 25% of total broadcasting time on a station basis. In reality, while the rule is nominally honoured, many networks apply the quota on a channel by channel basis. Unofficial figures indicate that foreign programming may account for as much as 50% of programming.

  The rules governing television are not increasing, as the Times suggests. What seems to be increasing is the degree to which they are openly flaunted by broadcasters. Let me explain.

• Amazon China and Suning Quit Selling iPads in Ongoing Trademark Battle | Tech in Asia – Two Chinese B2C e-commerce sites, Amazon China and Suning.com (SHE:002024), have removed the iPad from sale in an apparent move to avoid implication in the Apple versus Proview legal battle over the use of the iPad name in mainland China. Today, a search for ‘iPad’ or ‘iPad 2’ or any relevant permutation yields results only for accessories for (or rivals of) Apple’s (NASDAQ:AAPL) iconic tablet on both those sites (pictured above).
• China unable to silence Internet buzz on police chief – USATODAY.com – “Political intrigue is a part of life here; it’s like living in Washington, D.C., but in the Internet age … all of a sudden it’s instantaneous and accessible to millions,” says Bill Bishop, a Beijing-based independent analyst and Internet expert from Washington. “This is China political intrigue 2.0, the first major political succession in the Internet age, and it’s a real challenge to the government.”
  China’s traditional media are managed by the Communist Party’s propaganda department, while new media, mostly privately funded, enjoy more freedom, says Hu Yong, an Internet and new media expert at Peking University.
  “The Internet is both a challenge and an opportunity for the Chinese government. On the one hand, they use this new form of public space as a kind of measurement of Chinese public opinion,” he says. “On the other hand, the democratization of information makes the government very afraid of losing the whole control of information.”
• Tim Cook: Sales In China Were $13B Last Year | TechCrunch – If one takes China as an example, Cook said, Mac sales grew over 100 percent year-over-year. While objectively that may not seem like much, the entire market itself only grew 10 percent year-over-year. Not only that, but a few years China was “only” producing sales in the hundreds of millions for Apple, whereas last year, sales in China had grown to $13 billion. Cook said that this, among other things, is just further evidence of the explosive potential of Asian markets, specifically China.
• Business Insider: Yahoo’s New CEO Just Made His First Excellent Move, And Boy Are Shareholders Angry – Yahoo shareholders are angry at Thompson right now, and they’re taking it out on the company’s stock price.
  Good for Thompson for ignoring them.  It is to their benefit.
  (The big winners in the cash-rich split were never going to be Yahoo shareholders, anyway. It was going to be the PE firms orchestrating the deal. They were going to lend Alibaba the money, and then, if the rumors were true, convince Alibaba and Yahoo to use that money to buy companies from their own portfolios! )
• Yahoo’s Talks With Alibaba and Softbank Said to Have Collapsed – NYTimes.com- The talks to put together a tax-free transaction — known as a cash-rich split — ended on Monday after several days of negotiations in Hong Kong, said these people, who spoke on condition of anonymity. According to one of these people, Alibaba’s chief financial officer and lead negotiator, Joe Tsai, indicated to his Yahoo counterpart, Timothy Morse, that the two sides might need to seek an alternative deal.It was unclear why the talks fell apart, although the pace of negotiations had been exceedingly slow. The two sides were still weeks away from being able to announce a deal, and Yahoo still needed to obtain formal assurances from the Internal Revenue Service that such a transaction would be tax-free.
• Director Client Services/GM E-Commerce Consultancy & Digital Agency China at Web2Asia in Shanghai – Job | LinkedIn – Director Client Services/GM E-Commerce Consultancy & Digital Agency China at Web2Asia in Shanghai – Job | LinkedIn

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