Media On Demand (MOD), the great gray hope of pay content, may someday be worthwhile in some countries. Will it ever be worth a damn in Taiwan? Not likely.

Chunghwa Telecom (中華電信), leading telecoms/broadband player in Taiwan, offered me and many others free or very cheap MOD with an ADSL subscription. Chunghwa has been making hay this week about the "huge" number of folks in Taiwan who tuned into their MOD Olympic Games feed, delivering a spike over normal traffic. Yes, a whopping 190,000 folks on the island watched the opening ceremonies over MOD.

Alas, Chunghwa are the ONLY folks with a legit Beijing 2008 feed in Taiwan, something that could have had a huge impact in uptake for the service were it not for the fact that people here don't watch a lot of sports.

The Chunghwa MOD box has sat in my apartment for three-odd months, mostly unused. Why, you ask, would I not take advantage of a leading-edge multimedia experience provided gratis by my broadband company? Uh, because, at least here in Taiwan, MOD blows chunks.

Regular Taiwan cable TV is bad enough. MOD basically has nearly all the same channels plus a few random Australia and Italian ones, etc. Of course, the only reason for this is that Chunghwa could license those channels no one wants to watch at bargain rates. Yeah, that makes a LOT of sense... try to get uptake for a new service by providing channels no one wants to watch that you paid next-to-nothing to distribute.

However, with the Olympics on, I figured I'd give my little black MOD box another chance. Excited by the prospect of the FIVE channels of coverage Chunghwa was promoting, I tuned in. Of course, disappointment was at hand: Much of what they are showing is not live, and usually one or two of the channels are showing the exact same thing. Plus, while I realize it's not Chunghwa's fault, did I really want to watch the team archery competitions?

I think I'll stick to watching TV show downloads from the US and the monotonous gloom and doom of CNN for now.

More to come
-jag

 

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