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NetEase.com, one of China's leading Internet and online game services providers, has constructed the new official website for the China Basketball Association (CBA), which was launched this week, just in time for the beginning of the 2008/09 CBA League season.

The new CBA Official Website (www.cbachina.com) is a comprehensive portal for basketball in China and will serve Team China Basketball, the successful national basketball teams of China, as well as the fast-growing and successful CBA League.

Basketball is currently China’s top sport on television and it has huge on-line potential, with a reputed 300 million fans in China. Both the CBA League and China’s national basketball teams are marketed by Infront China, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the international sports marketing company Infront Sports & Media.

NetEase is one of the top three portal websites in China and is recognised also as the best online game provider. These attributes will be used to create more interactive opportunities for CBA fans. The company is organising an extensive media network to cover and report on the CBA league and Team China, consisting of 50 journalists from 30 printed media and coverage of 17 cities.

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It will exclusively broadcast all CBA Team and League games online and will also feature game highlights. It also plans to cover the 2009 Asian Basketball Championships, where Team China is expected to shine as the men’s and women’s teams won gold medals at the 2006 Asian Games in Doha.

Features of the site will include interactive events – such as the fan ballot to choose the players for the CBA All-Star Game. The last All-Star Game took place on 13 January 2008 and about five million fans took part in the ballot – a record. CBA charities and grassroots activities will also be promoted through the new website, as well as historical data and information on the players, taken from the association’s database.

The partners intended to develop a CBA Fantasy online game, which players can enter through the site. Currently NetEase is the leader in the Chinese domestic online game market, with Fantasy Xiyou and Dahua Xiyou as the most popular domestic games. The International Football Fantasy was developed by NetEase and has 210,000 registered users.

Yan Ming, the Director of NetEase Sport said: “Online video broadcasting in China has great potential and its inclusion on the new site will increase coverage of domestic basketball. During the Beijing Olympics, online video broadcasting became a major route for people to watch the Games. The viewing on NetEase was 470 million people in China far beyond NBC’s cumulative audience in the US.”

Arthur Wang, Infront China’s Corporate Affair Director said: “Traffic to the CBA Official Website has been climbing significantly for the last three years. The new agreement with NetEase and the addition of extensive video coverage on line will allow fans much greater and more flexible access to the sport, in a way that is compatible with the television coverage and will transform coverage of Chinese basketball.”