Putting on a star performance in Africa

Its 320 channels include 38 in Chinese, one of which is the well-known Chinese soap opera A Beautiful Daughter-in-Law Era, which has been winning new fans in Tanzania.

The company is building an African headquarters and dubbing center in Nairobi, which when completed next year, will be the launchpad for a whole industry chain including program selection, translation, broadcasting and copyright trading.

Guo adds that its goal is to allow every African family to afford quality digital TV.

"For only $3 to $5 a month they can watch up to 30 channels," he says.

Pang Xinxing, CEO of StarTimes. CHINA DAILY

Before heading to Africa, StarTimes was considered a small-time enterprise based in Beijing. When its CEO Pang Xinxing first visited the continent, he was staggered by the scale of the potential, he says.

At that time, just one company was operating a digital TV business, and on average customers needed to pay $70 a month for the service.

"Back then, $70 was a big amount, even without considering that most Africans didn't even have a TV to watch in the first place," Pang says.

"But we were confident of growth as several African nations were planning to shift from analog to digital TV signals. Now we plan to roll out our digital TV programs to 30 African nations over the next five years," he says.

Apart from providing digital TV services, StarTimes has also established 17 new channels including those showing Western movies, African programs, South African soap operas and Chinese programs, which produces more than 10,000 hours of programming a year.

The company has also translated 40 TV programs, movies and documentaries, into English, French, Hausa and Swahili.

"To accelerate our development, we have cooperated with local partners," Guo says, "and now have signed agreements with numerous TV stations - including the Nigerian Television Authority, which is the national television network and also Africa's largest television network - providing content for them.

"By doing this we have outlets for our programs, and the local TV stations can also boost their advertisement revenues with the added content," he says.

Michael Wu, the managing director of StarTimes in Nairobi, said in a previous interview with China Daily that part of the company's strategy is to tone down its Chinese origins.