Vietnam plans multilingual international TV service

The plan to broadcast Vietnamese news to the world has been outlined by the Ministry of Information and Communication in its Master Broadcasting Development Plan for Radio and Television Services by 2020. Under the master plan, the Ministry of Information and Communication aims to broadcast news via satellite to North America, Europe and Asia–Pacific by 2015 and throughout the world by 2020.

The national television channel will produce up to 20 hours of news coverage per day while the radio channel will run 24 hours per day by 2020. Initially, these channels will air internationally qualified production programmes [sic] in foreign languages for at least 8 hours per day to give international communities a better understanding of Viet Nam’s current political, socio-economic development, culture and lifestyle spheres.

The radio channel will primarily use the current Voice of Vietnam on Channel 5 (VOV5). Programmes will be aired in multiple languages: English, French, Japanese, Chinese, Russian, German, Spanish, Indonesian, Lao, Khmer, Vietnamese, Arabic and Korean.

The Vietnam Television Channel 4 (VTV4) will broadcast programmes in English, French, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, German and Spanish. Viet Nam Television Corporation (VTC) Channel 10 and VTV4 will air programmes for Vietnamese overseas.