Bayon TV, The Latest Edition to Join SuncasTV

Bayon TV, Cambodia's largest television, radio and broadcasting channel, will be featured on SuncasTV.

Chicago, IL (PRWEB) April 11, 2008 -- Bayon TV, Cambodia's largest television, radio and broadcasting channel, will be featured on SuncasTV.

Bayon TV: Cambodian TV with a Smile! was founded in 1998 in the Kingdom of Cambodia. The channel is broadcast directly from Phnom Penh and has 4 sub-stations in Kampong Cham, Seim Reab, Shihanouk Ville and Stung Treng. This popular channel broadcasts current events, entertainment news, movies and also features the arts. It is owned by the Prime Minister of Cambodia, Hun Sen, who is also the leader of the Cambodian People's Party.

SuncasTV is a subsidiary of the Suncast Network, Inc., located in Arlington Heights, IL. SuncasTV offers Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) to the North American television viewing public, with a specialty towards providing programming from Asian channels and networks.
SuncasTV is the first IPTV to have full contractual rights to broadcast Bayon TV, which is going to be a channel available to viewers 24/7.

Amongst the channels featured on SuncasTV are English, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Malaysian, Chinese, Korean, Indian, Filipino, Thai and Japanese. Apart from that, there are also channels covering sports, entertainment and the arts, food and real estate.

This new venture between Bayon TV and SuncasTV will serve as a platform to nurture future relations and help strengthen ties between the Cambodians and the Asian American public.

SuncasTV is happy to present you Bayon TV and invites you all to watch this new channel at http://www.suncastv.com/cambodia/index.html; it will be available for viewing on April 1, 2008. SuncasTV provides our Khmer viewers, 24-hour coverage directly from Cambodia with news, interviews, sports, political programs, dramas, documentaries, variety shows and movies. The vision of SuncasTV Cambodia is to bring all the Khmer communities from all over the United States together by allowing all the organizations to post their local news and event video to our Khmer Community Channel.

ABOUT SuncasTV
SuncasTV is ahead of the curve in introducing the IPTV concept to American audiences. SuncasTV is an IPTV service provider which supports IPTV viewers in the U.S. and globally by offering a wide range of information and entertainment content from around the world. (www.suncastv.com). It has a specialty towards providing programming from Asian channels and networks. It targets IPTV viewers in the U.S. with initial entry in the Asian market by offering content from a variety of Asian countries. Currently the channel carries content from China, Korea, Philippines, India, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand and Japan, and there is an English channel.

Traditional TV viewing required broadcast reception, satellite dish, or cable. Without installing any cables or satellite dishes, one can watch your favorite broadcasts delivered to your TV set whenever you want, regardless of where in the world you are. This is the future trend for TV viewing/delivery. IPTV will soon be the standard platform for delivery for video on demand (VOD), pay per view (PPV) and subscription content from providers.

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Thousands homeless after Cambodian slum fire: police

PHNOM PENH - Thousands were made homeless early Friday after a slum fire in Cambodia's capital Phnom Penh destroyed more than 200 homes, police said.

The blaze broke out in an area crowded with poorly-built wooden shacks, police said, adding that the cause of the fire was still under investigation.

"Hundreds of houses were completely destroyed," said Pong Savrith, military police deputy commander.

"They were all small wooden houses that were built in a disorderly manner," he told AFP as a column of thick smoke continued to billow into the sky.

Neighbourhood residents swarmed into nearby streets, struggling to rescue their belongings, while others huddled on the curbside, crying as their homes burned.

About 200 firefighters and volunteers worked for five hours to douse the blaze, said fire chief Sok Vannar.

"This is the biggest fire this year," he said, adding that no one had been hurt.

Although large neighbourhood fires are increasingly rare in Phnom Penh, a series of suspicious blazes several years ago destroyed a number of slum areas, forcing tens of thousands to flee.


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Cambodia, Indonesia's Rajawali to set up airline

JAKARTA, April 10 (Reuters) - The Cambodian government and Indonesia's Rajawali Corporation agreed on Thursday to set up a new national flag airline to serve Cambodia's growing tourism industry, the company said in a statement.

The joint-venture company's capital is estimated to reach $50 million and the Cambodian government will own 51 percent while Rajawali Group will own the rest.

"With a national flag carrier, we envisage our economy and tourism industry will grow rapidly," Cambodia's Deputy Prime Minister, Sok An, said in the statement released by Rajawali.

Cambodia launched its own national flag carrier, Royal Air Cambodge (RAC), in the mid-1990s but it went bankrupt, resulting in heavy losses for the government.

The new carrier, however, might have a better chance due to the rising number of tourists to Cambodia. In 2007, the country attracted more than 2 million tourists and more than 60 percent of them used air travel.

The number of tourist arrivals in 2007 rose almost 19 percent from the previous year and air travel increased more than 25 percent, according to the tourism minister on the official Web site www.mot.gov.kh.

Rajawali was founded by Indonesian entrepreneur Peter Sondakh, ranked by Globe Asia magazine as 19th wealthiest Indonesian with a net worth of $510 million. The group controls diversified businesses from a cement firm to department stores and a taxi company.

It holds an around 25 percent stake in Semen Gresik SMGR.JK, Indonesia's largest cement maker. Rajawali also founded the country's third-largest mobile phone firm before selling its stake to Telekom Malaysia (TLMM.KL: Quote, Profile, Research) and Emirates Telecommunications ETEL.AD.

(Additional reporting by Tyagita Silka) (Reporting by Nury Sybli, writing by Tyagita Silka, editing by Sugita Katyal)

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The relevance of Cambodia

There are some names in the obituary columns that say more than the voices of the living.

Such is the name of Dith Pran, who died last Sunday at 65. He was the Cambodian photographer who somehow survived the collection of killing fields that his country became after the Americans abandoned it. And who somehow made his way to the United States to tell the world about it.

Hundreds of thousands of his countrymen would lose their lives after the Khmer Rouge swept into Phnom Penh and began rounding up just about anybody who could read and write. Literacy is dangerous. It gives people ideas, and the only ideas allowed in the new Cambodia were the Party's.

The toll of the Khmer Rouge's brief reign of terror in Cambodia (1975-78) is uncertain –– a million, two? Maybe a third of the country's pre-Communist population. The numbers can only be estimated, but the pictures of pyramids of skulls are well known. They've become emblematic of that bloody time.

It wasn't supposed to happen that way, not according to the sophisticates who were advocating an American withdrawal from Indochina in the 1970s. They blithely dismissed all the warnings that a bloodbath would follow once the United States abandoned its allies in Southeast Asia:

"Indochina Without Americans/For Most, A Better Life," –– headline in The New York Times, April 13, 1975.

The Times' correspondent in Phnom Penh, Sydney Schanberg, may have been the most blithe of all about Cambodia's better future once the Americans left. In a report four days before Phnom Penh fell, he wrote that for "ordinary people of Indochina ... it is difficult to imagine how their lives could be anything but better with the Americans gone."

Schanberg's limited imagination would soon enough be demonstrated by the unspeakable realities to follow. He was still sending optimistic dispatches even as the holocaust was proceeding. He was so monstrously wrong about what would happen in Cambodia after the Communist victory there that he won a Pulitzer Prize for it. The name of his Cambodian photographer, translator, guide and friend? Dith Pran.

The fast-talking Cambodian managed to save Schanberg and other Western journalists from the Khmer Rouge, but was unable to make it out of the country with them. In the swirling chaos of the Communist takeover, all was terror and confusion. The Khmer Rouge were emptying schools and hospitals and whole cities in their hunt for class enemies. (Anybody who wore glasses –– the surest sign of a bourgeois intellectual –– was in danger.)

Dith Pran managed to survive the ceaseless labor, the brutal beatings and the starvation diet (a tablespoon of rice a day), and eventually snuck across the Thai border. Reunited with Schanberg, he would go on to become a photographer for the Times.

Now, once again, the sophisticates are urging Americans to abandon an ally, this time beleaguered Iraq. The leading Democratic presidential candidates speak glibly of pulling out of that country as if there would be no ill effects. As in Cambodia?

This week the American commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, is testifying once again before Congress, and once again he'll be met by a chorus of cynicism, no matter how much real progress his strategy, aka The Surge, has made. Last time he testified, Hillary Clinton told the general it would take "a willing suspension of disbelief" to credit what he said. The critics of the war have their script and are sticking to it. Just as Sydney Schanberg knew all would be better once the Americans had left Cambodia.

What would an American withdrawal now mean for the Iraqis? It is now too late to ask Dith Pran. But his life and trials speak eloquently enough.


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Vietnam donates rice seeds to Cambodia

VietNamNet Bridge – The Committee for Southwestern region of Vietnam has donated 300 tonnes of rice seeds to Cambodia to help local farmers with the crop cultivation.

The rice seeds were presented at a ceremony on April 9 during a visit to Cambodia by Vice Chairman of the Committee Son Song Son.

Deputy Head of the Cambodian Prime Minister’s Office Heng Bun Heng accepted the donation, saying it further strengthened the traditional friendship between the people of Cambodia and Vietnam .

Heng thanked the Government and people of Vietnam for their solid commitment to Cambodia during their past struggle against the Pol Pot genocidal regime as well as current national construction and development.

In addition to rice varieties, the committee will donate another 150,000 USD worth of goods, including 300 packages of instant noodles, five tonnes of glutamate and six tonnes of soap.

(Source: VNA)
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