"Three mountains" weighing on China's radio and television industry: China's radio and television industry seeks a way out of the broadband market

The hype about 5G has masked many problems.

For China Radio and Television, which is at the center of the storm, it not only needs to rely on 700MHz 5G to open up the mobile communications field, but also needs to fully activate the resources of cable TV/fixed-line broadband and gain a firm foothold in the F5G field. Because, according to the data of the three major telecom operators last year, fixed-line represented by home broadband and dedicated lines has become the biggest driving force for growth.

But this "turnaround battle" is even more difficult than 5G!

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At the CCBN--Broadband Construction Innovation Forum held last week, Wang Binghui, deputy general manager of China Broadcasting Broadband Network Co., Ltd., spoke freely about his views on China Radio and Television's broadband network construction and operation in the gigabit home era.

Wang Binghui frankly said that compared with the three major telecom operators, China Radio and Television still has a big gap in network infrastructure, product competitiveness, business innovation capabilities and many other aspects. Faced with the current market difficulties, China Radio and Television must adhere to the "one country, one chessboard" and build a unified national evaluation system to improve broadband quality, reduce costs and improve operational capabilities through network-based traffic, network-based clicks and content introduction. "Only through national unified standards, unified scheduling, unified introduction and unified planning, and local operations can we build our content well, increase radio and television broadband traffic and reduce costs."

The "Three Big Mountains" of Broadband

Authoritative data from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology show that as of the end of March, my country's fixed Internet broadband access users with access speeds of 100Mbps and above reached 451 million, accounting for 90.6% of the total number of users, an increase of 0.7% from the end of last year.

Judging from the financial reports of the three major operators, home broadband business is still growing rapidly, with the number of users increasing by 11.3% in 2020 and business revenue increasing by 16%, indicating that broadband operations have not yet reached their ceiling. In particular, China Mobile's broadband user ARPU increased by 7.6%.

Wang Binghui pointed out that compared with telecom operators, the ARPU value of radio and television network companies has not increased, but has declined; not only in terms of broadband access, but also in IDC and cloud computing, radio and television are in a "blind spot" and have not seized any opportunities. In his view, the proposal and gradual implementation of the "dual gigabit" strategy is a big test for radio and television.

Wang Binghui frankly said that the radio and television network companies are facing three major challenges: "First, the broadband operating costs remain high; second, the product competitiveness is not as good as that of competitors; third, there is a lack of business innovation capabilities." In terms of cost, the CP content of telecom operators is paid and profitable, but radio and television operators need to spend money to buy it, which increases user costs; in terms of products, the main gap lies in broadband construction and access bandwidth capabilities; in terms of business innovation, some provincial radio and television networks still regard home broadband as a value-added service of cable TV, while telecom operators regard it as a basic service and have developed many products on this basis. "Now, apart from video on demand and OTT, we really don't have any other applications and services launched. Our product innovation capabilities cannot make up for the shortcomings, and the ARPU value will never go up."

The solution is to work together as one

Wang Binghui believes that although the Radio and Television Department is facing great pressure, it still has opportunities.

First of all, the goal should not be changed, we must catch up, and distinguish between advantages and disadvantages. For the traditional market, the most urgent thing now is to achieve unified management of content across the country, first build content, which is not on-demand video, but to establish an operation and distribution network, so as to reduce costs.

Secondly, we need to consider cloud-network synergy and move forward towards the goal of the three major operators. We need to plan the introduction and distribution of broadband content across the country, unite the entire network to form a unified bargaining power, and consider the current situation when building content distribution. Unlike operators, each province has a sufficient user base and volume. We need to choose regional distribution to save costs in some provinces. After regional distribution, we need to connect with the network resources of the region, introduce content centrally and distribute it in the region, and use a centralized scheduling platform. This scheduling platform must achieve real-time monitoring of each network fulcrum.

Now, each province has also introduced content, but the click-through rate and internal network rate vary greatly. This means that each province, especially some provinces, have only configured this as a static parameter after introducing it. In fact, the flow direction scheduling during customer access is a real-time dynamic process. Without this process, no matter how much content is introduced, the internal network rate will not be good. The scheduling platform must analyze the content, perceive the network, sample and analyze the underlying technical network, and make dynamic adjustments and dynamic scheduling, so as to maximize the efficiency of introducing content and minimize broadband costs.

Finally, we need to build a national unified evaluation system, including traffic localization rate, click localization rate, and content introduction indicators. Through these three constructions, we can improve broadband quality, reduce costs, and enhance operational capabilities. Only through national unified standards, unified scheduling, unified introduction and unified planning, and local operations, can we build good content, increase traffic, and reduce costs.