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U.S. MyWeb Starts Selling Set-Top Boxes in China
(6/24/99) San Francisco-based MyWeb Inc.com began selling its television set-top boxes on the Chinese market on June 24 on the heels of a May agreement with Beijing Telecom to market 200,000 set-top boxes for purchase or rental to the company`s telephone customers.

The use of television set top boxes for internet browsing in China is seen as an affordable alternative to buying a personal computer. Television ownership is extremely common relative to PC ownership in China, with the number of PCs estimated at 11 million and the number of televisions estimated at 300 million, according to the company press release. MyWeb’s set-top box costs RMB1,488 (US$180), or about a third the price of a low-end PC in China.

MyWeb set top boxes are automatically linked to its Chinese-language portal, MyWeb Online China (www.myweb.com.cn), which provides content related to news, entertainment, finance, and education. The company claims to be the first to offer Chinese consumers set-top boxes linked directly to online services and content.

MyWeb C.E.O. T.S. Wong told Dow Jones that most of estimated US$5-8 million in revenue this year will come from set top box sales. In the future, Wong said, more and more income will come from advertising and e-commerce through the MyWeb Online China service.

Many companies have been scrambling to enter China’s potentially enormous set-top box market. Microsoft (Venus), Kaisi (Nuwa), Changhong (Digital Sunshine), and HiSense (Family Network Express) are just of few of them. MyWeb claims that it has an edge over their competitors due to their strong local connections.

"Right now, our strength is that we have significant relationships in China," said Walter Ling, Vice President of MyWeb in the U.S.

Specifically, MyWeb has an agreement to aggregate the content of the Beijing securities firm China Sci Tech, and also has a pending agreement with "a major news agency in China," he said.

Reaction to set-top boxes in China has not been all positive. A recent article in the Zhonghua Gongshang Shibao (China Business Times) characterized the set-top box as an overhyped "transitional product," saying that the boxes are incompatible with the 200-300 line resolution of most Chinese television sets, making web sites appear blurry and sometimes illegible. The article also complained the limited data storage capacity of the set-top box makes it "almost impossible" to download information or set up home pages.

Ling, however, said that MyWeb internet surfing is free of the fuzziness or flickering complained about in the Chinese media.

"The resolution seemed great to me, and the speed was surprisingly fast," he said of a product trial in China, adding that MyWeb’s cooperation with strong companies such as Philips Consumer Electronics helped to avoid such problems.

Ling was unable to comment on the memory capacity of MyWeb’s set-top box, however.

MyWeb listed on the Nasdaq over-the-counter bulletin board this February, but Ling would not comment on a future NASDAQ listing.

[tgfn]

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gruß tgfn