China’s Xiaomi, the world’s third-largest smartphone manufacturer, is stepping sideways and getting into television.
Writing in its official Weibo microblog the company said it will invest $1 billion in building television content.
The big idea is that providing TV content will help enrich the company’s content and becoming a ‘leading bellwether for the industry.’
Details of the move are sketchy at the moment, but Xiaomi is entering a rocky sea where many leading bellwethers, including Microsoft, Intel and Apple have run aground.
It most likely that the content that the company is thinking of creating will be for the Chinese market, and might provide a different sort of service to what has been attempted in the West.
However, the company’s business model does require it to provide more content. The company sells their phones at cost, stating that the hardware is the delivery vehicle for the software. It has its own ecommerce platform, which is the third largest in China and pushes itself as a form of social media.
