See the Olympics on MySpace

The Censor-full China Central Television (CCTV) will allow two China-based web sites to offer streaming broadcasts of the Olympic events. Originally, under the January introduced Internet censorship plan, every site that wasn’t government-owned would be blocked, thus making streaming impossible.

MySpace China and Tudou.com were chosen by CCTV, the Beijing Olympics’ official Internet and mobile phone broadcaster because of their wide reach and popularity. Info World, relating the story, said that the terms of agreement were not disclosed. To be honest, I would have been really surprised if there was any leak or additional information other than what could be input on a need-to-know basis.

Unfortunately, the streamed broadcasts will only be available in China, the two companies said, due to the fact that China Central Television’s rights only cover the Asian country. The only piece of information left hanging was whether the programming would be available in other languages except Chinese.

MySpace, vying for supremacy on the social networks market with arch-rival Facebook, has been granted what can be called a unique opportunity to boost numbers, even if for a short period of time. The Beijing-located site has only been in operations for one year and would have had a lot of struggle ahead of it to establish an important position, like its US-based mother company managed to do.

Tudou is the Chinese version of YouTube, with a very big fan base that contributes to its growth. Nielsen Netratings reported in July 2007 that the video sharing site was one of the fastest growing sites on the web, with over 6 million unique users per week and almost half a billion page views over the same period of time.

The two sites have already tagged the logo of the Beijing Olympics on their sites, as shown in the picture on the left.

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