MySpace, Tudou Join CCTV as Olympic Partners
Joining CCTV, the Beijing Olympics' official Internet and mobile phone broadcaster, are online video sites Tudou.com and MySpace China.(This article was updated with corrected information on 2/29/08 at 8:27 a.m.)
China Central Television (CCTV) will allow two China-based Web sites to offer content related to Olympic events, the companies announced Wednesday.
Joining CCTV, the Beijing Olympics' official Internet and mobile phone broadcaster, are popular online video site Tudou.com and MySpace China. Terms of the agreement were not disclosed.
CCTV.com holds the online broadcast rights to the Olympics, with Sohu.com operating the official Web site for the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games (BOCOG).
Shanghai-based Tudou is China's most popular online video site. In July 2007, Nielsen Netratings reported that Tudou was one of the Web's fastest-growing sites, with over 6 million unique users per week and almost half a billion Web pages per week.
The deal is a particularly big win for MySpace China, based in Beijing, which has been operating here for less than a year, and has not yet established itself as the powerhouse in China that its social-networking site is in the U.S.
The content, such as fan pages, highlight videos and commentary, will only be accessible in China, the companies said, as CCTV's rights only cover China. It has not yet been decided if programming will be available only in Chinese or if other languages would be included.