Fans in China would have access to NBA video
content on Alipay, the hugely popular payments app owned by Ant
Group, the company said in a statement.
The collaboration with the professional basketball league's
Chinese business arm will also cover areas such as joint
marketing campaigns and digital collectables, Ant Group said.
NBA China last week launched a channel in Alipay that shows
user-generated content from NBA China's network of influencers
and Alipay's authorised content creators, Ant Group added.
The NBA is one of the United States' most popular cultural
exports to China and makes hundreds of millions of dollars a
year from its presence in the Chinese market.
However, a decades-long partnership with state broadcaster CCTV
was upset in October 2019 when then-Houston Rockets General
Manager Daryl Morey tweeted in support of widespread protests in
Hong Kong, a Chinese-ruled city that was embroiled in a
political crisis that included months of anti-government
demonstrations.
Morey's tweet, though quickly deleted, was criticised strongly
in China, and CCTV stopped showing NBA games immediately, in
what became an 18-month blackout.
Basketball fans in China are watching NBA games at levels close
to where they were before the 2019 rift, Reuters reported in
December, citing a source familiar with the league's viewership
data.
(Reporting by Brenda Goh and Roxanne Liu; Editing by Tom Hogue
and Jamie Freed)
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