Sumner Redstone says he has no patience for patience, but when it comes to China, the rosy-cheeked chief of U.S. media giant Viacom may be ignoring his own advice.
A full year after Viacom was granted permission to beam its MTV 24-hour music channel to a sliver of southern China, Redstone said Viacom would set up a joint venture to produce television shows in Shanghai.
The venture, in which Redstone said Viacom will have a "huge" stake but not a majority, is the first of its kind since China opened the door to foreign investment in the tightly controlled area of content production.
The deal took a year to hammer out, but would help Viacom's chief goal in China, which is to spread MTV and Nickelodeon, its children's cable channel, to the entire country, Redstone said.
"We still have big ambitions for expanding our presence in China both for MTV and Nickelodeon," he said. A venture with Beijing Television could come "soon", he added, but gave no details.
"Our ambition is for a 24-hour MTV channel nationwide. It's no secret," Redstone said. "Just stay tuned."
MTV is beamed around the clock to about seven million homes in Guangdong, one of China's wealthiest provinces, and carried in syndicated chunks to about 150 million homes.
The venture with Shanghai Media Group will make educational and animated children's shows to be piped into about eight million homes served by the group's cable television arm.
It will give Viacom a slice of advertising sales, but still needs final approval from authorities, which Redstone said he was confident would come soon.
Viacom's China ad sales rose 23 percent last year, Redstone said.
"We've been very successful in selling advertising," he said. "So we're optimistic."
Financial details for the project were not disclosed.
Asked by a Chinese reporter how he did business, Redstone said: "I move as fast as I can, relentlessly, without fail. That's my style. I have no patience for patience."
But it has been a long haul in China for Viacom and rival foreign media companies such as Time Warner and News Corp.
Redstone has made annual pilgrimages to China for six years, confident that efforts to crack a potential market of 1.3 billion people would pay off.
China's Communist authorities, wary that foreign media and entertainment could undermine traditional morals and loosen their grip on power, have kept tight control over the sector for years.
But Redstone said that may be changing.
Last year, the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television eased its ban on foreign investment in TV programming, paving the way for Viacom's venture.
That followed a move to allow foreigners to buy minority stakes in film studios.
"Never before have we seen so much openness, even suggestions as to how we can further our business in China," Redstone said.
"I think they trust us. This time, I tell you, we were amazed at the openness."
Viacom also signed a deal to broadcast 90 minutes of shows from Nickelodeon on a new children's channel set up by China Central Television.
He said Viacom would push to roll out CCTV's English-language channel to more homes and hotels in the United States, in part to help educate Americans about the world's most populous country.
"Most of what they know is distorted and unfair, and we're determined to change that," Redstone said.
