âGo Princess Goâ is produced by LeTV, one of China's biggest online video companies. (Photo : Google)
LeTV, a Beijing-based tech firm, announced on Tuesday that it has bought one-year 4G contracts from China Unicom. The deal will offer its users 6GB of 4G access monthly, to be specifically used to watch videos on the company's sites.
The exclusive 4G access will be available to around 3.6 million users. The amount of 4G access is enough to download high-definition films.
Though both LeTV and China Unicom refused to disclose how much the deal is worth, they revealed that the amount of 4G traffic was valued over 770 million yuan.
The deal, according to International Data Corporation telecom analyst Milly Xiang, will potentially be the country's biggest procurement of carrier traffic.
Xiang said that "playing online videos requires an extremely high amount of mobile traffic and that is perhaps why LeTV has purchased so much."
Meanwhile, China Unicom's manager of online shopping site Wu Zhaoxiang stated that the partnership with LeTV will also be expanding into other areas including customer service and retailing.
On the other hand, Feng Xing, head of LeTV's smartphone division, shared that more projects with China Unicom are underway, covering ventures like selling LeTV-branded Internet television and smartphones in the carrier's branches nationwide.
"We are planning to sell one million smartphones using China Unicom's marketing channels across the country by the end of this year," Feng enthused, adding that the firm is eyeing to sell at least 10 million handset units in 2016.
LeTV's pricing strategy, which is to sell devices at low-cost prices and gather profit from paid video contents, has also pushed rivals like Xiaomi Corp. to lower their product prices.
The firm is intensifying its content-making endeavor as the market for smartphone market begins to shrink. An IDC report revealed that its device's sales in Q1 2015 fell, a first for the past six years.
