Asian Content Expands

Digital Island (www.digitalisland.net) announced that Reuters, with the help of Digital Island, will launch a customized financial video report in Japanese for the Web, Reuters Financial Video Online — Japanese (FVO-J). Digital Island will provide Reuters with managed hosting, networking and streaming services.

Reuters and Digital Island have worked together to launch similar services in the U.S. and the U.K.

"We are pleased with initial response in the U.S. and the U.K. with products we began offering in 2000,'' said Ralph Nicholson, executive vice president of general news video and audio, Reuters Media, in a statement. "Now the time is right, the market is ready, and with Digital Island's managed Internet infrastructure services we have the technology to expand the use of online video on a global scale.''

Digital Island will stream FVO-J, a package Japanese-narrated financial video news reports, throughout the market day as well as acquiring, formatting and delivering the live video signal to Reuters customer sites. The same programming will be available on-demand from servers hosted at Digital Island's Tokyo data center.

In other Asian content news, SpeedCast (www.speedcast.com), a broadband infrastructure company based in Hong Kong, announced it would be adding WahTV from India to its content offerings. WahTV is part of Wahindia.com (www.wahindia.com), one of India's media giants with the first Indian broadband portal.

Under the terms of the agreement, WahTV will utilize SpeedCast's satellite IP platform to stream a variety of multimedia content, including news, fashion, movies, music, and interviews with leading politicians and high profile film stars.

"We are proud to partner with SpeedCast to deliver our Indian content throughout Asia and the Middle East," remarked Madhu Trehan, managing director of WahTV in a statement.