TVB.com and Tencent launch TVB.com Weibo platform

TVB.com has had a formal blogging community since 2008, and now has over 400 TVB artists posting updates for their fans. This partnership with Tencent Weibo would be an upgrade as the old TVB blog community did not have instant messenging capabilities.

TVB.com said that the partnership with Tencent meant the channel could take advantage of the 200 million people currently using the Weibo network. They are now able to instantly capture the TVB artists news and have interact with them online.

TV fans with the same interests and topics can use the tvb.com Weibo platform through to share their updates and chat anytime and anywhere via website and mobile apps.

Ivy Wong, the outgoing COO of TVB.com says the partnership is a milestone for the company. "With the launch of tvb.com Weibo, tvb.com is having a big step forward to our dream 'to build a global community',” she said. “Now we have a strong catch-up TV service plus a global community to extend TVB’s influence to all over the world.”

She added that we welcome advertisers to do 'soft artists' endorsement', as our TVB artists are already very popular on weibo, they could promote the advertisers' products, rather than doing the conventional banner ads.

Norman Tam, head of international business, Tencent Hong Kong, added that the TVB.com weibo is the first wave of their strategic partnership with TVB, and there will be further collaborations.

tvb.com Weibo will have a  launch event at Emax in Kowloon Bay this afternoon, with TVB 16 artists  like Tse Tin-wah, Kate Tsui, Fala Chen, Kenneth Ma helping to promote the new platform.

Tencent Weibo is a Chinese mircoblogging website launched by Tencent in last April, previously it formed a partnership with EGG Music.com in Hong Kong.

According to an article on iChinaStick.com on 15 June, Tencent president Chiping Liu stated that as of May 2011, Tencent Weibo had reached more than 200 million registered users, 115 million active, and average monthly posts of more than 1.2 billion.