Basketball fans in remote Chinese provinces will soon be able to watch Yao Ming, the Houston Rockets' Chinese center, slam dunk on local television, thanks to new TV deals, the National Basketball Association said on Thursday.

The NBA told Reuters it has struck a raft of new deals with local channels in seven foreign countries, including Belarus, Georgia and China, as it looks to profit from the league's growing international flavor.

"Television is our first entry into a market," said Scott Levy, NBA Vice President of international television and marketing. The league said fans will be now able to watch the NBA in 212 countries in 42 different languages.

The new deals, NBA executives told Reuters, also include Brazil, Armenia, Poland and Lithuania. Existing television deals were renewed in Japan, Italy, Russia, Turkey, Iceland and Germany.

Local networks will broadcast games in local languages and produce highlight shows and weekly programs with licensed footage produced at the NBA's Secaucus, New Jersey studio.

It will be the first time NBA games will be aired on local networks in places such as Georgia and Belarus.

New deals signed in China put the NBA on 14 provincial networks and Chinese Central Television will give the NBA access to all 314 million households in China.

Aside from Houston's Yao, there are two other Chinese players in the NBA, Wang Zhizhi of the Los Angeles Clippers and Mengke Bateer of the Toronto Raptors.

Interest in the NBA is growing outside the United States as more foreign-born players have become stars in the league. High-profile American players such as Shaquille O'Neil, Tracy McGrady, and Allen Iverson are also international celebrities.

At the beginning of the 2003-2004 season there were 73 foreign-born players on NBA rosters, up from 68 last year. These include all stars such as Ming, the Dallas Mavericks' German forward Dirk Nowitzki and the Sacramento Kings' Serbian forward Peja Stojakovic.

In addition to local network deals, the NBA is selling its 24-hour basketball channel to cable and satellite operators in the US and abroad. Launched in late 1999 as the news and highlight channel NBA.com TV, NBA TV was relaunched last year with live games and original programming.

Among the cable operators carrying the channel in digital sports packages are Time Warner Cable, a unit of Time Warner Inc., Cox Communications Inc., and Cablevision Systems Corp. Talks are underway with Comcast Corp. and other cable operators.

An NBA executive would not say what percentage of revenue is earned abroad, except to say "it's an extremely important steam for the league."

But the league hopes to leverage local-language programming into licensing and merchandise sales. Ultimately, the NBA hopes to become a global league. Commissioner David Stern has said he would like to see a team based in Europe by 2010. To accomplish that goal, more NBA-sized arenas must be built in Europe with luxury boxes that could generate enough revenue to pay Shaq-sized player salaries.

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