I’ve just spent 4 days in Beijing, and it’s given me a fantastic insight into the skyrocketing Chinese media. On a trade mission with UKTI, I met senior teams from TV, mobile, movies and internet companies. The user numbers are staggering. Hundreds of millions are standard metrics for most companies. Tencent, the world’s third largest web portal has 1bn instant messenger users, a market cap of at least 20 billion and a 39% net profit margin. Some companies’ business models are baffling, and the very question brought wry smiles to the lips of many employees. It’s difficult to comprehend how a company listed on two stock exchanges can also be State owned and ultimately controlled, but that’s the Chinese way. Private and public are blurred.
What’s clear is that licences are necessary for everything – making, distributing, broadcasting, acquiring. “Do you have a licence?” was the most common question asked of us, and us of them. For outsiders, direct production with many Chinese companies will be a long haul for this reason; better to be a partner with a Chinese firm with a licence, though it will still take a lot of stamina, patience and innovative thinking. Get it right and the rewards are likely to be massive. Amongst our delegates were games companies seeing fantastic opportunities to distribute their content in China and act as agents for Chinese games internationally.
Chinese TV is celebrating the new found wealth and independence of the middle class, with programmes focusing on lifestyle. Documentary though isn’t diverse, with most of it is stuck in old school Discovery mode, retelling of familiar history or nature stories. When asked about co-production internationally, most channels could only point to one or two a few examples, and they were a few years back. China and the Chinese is the focus, but in a vast country with years of catching up to do on it, why wouldn’t it be? Still there is a great opportunity to introduce Chinese audiences to a much wider range of stories, and some of the commissioners I met, like at Beijing TV with a more forward thinking approach hope to give it to them.
IPTV has been a recent experiment with major expansion in China, but the numbers seem to be disappointing. A much better alternative that we saw from China Broadcasting Corporation – UHF TV delivered via mobile to an astonishingly high quality. For users it’s like having an old fashioned transistor radio, but dialling up video instead of audio, hunting for a signal wherever you are in China. The international potential, especially in the developing world, looked amazing.
It was more evidence that the phone is king, with 3 major companies dominating. We were told, however, that the State sets the rules, and this is a false market – market share never changes, and China Unicom is reaching the ABC1s because that’s what’s been decreed. Those 4 days saw the opening of China’s second Apple store in Shanghai and the launch of the iPad in Asia – though not China yet. iPhones are a huge part of the grey market, but whilst we saw many in the hands of media execs, no-one seemed to be able to tell us how many there are in the country. China Unicom is coming to apps only next year – it’s still a market a long way behind the UK. Mammoth Graphics, displaying their number one Tour De France app felt like they could be onto a winner, if they can ride the wave of apps that’s sure to be the next big consumer development.
Right now linear fiction is booming with a new focus on genre storytelling that is getting young people out and into the new cinemas. Interactivity still seems to mean chat and social media, which of course is exploding. Cross platform content is still in its infancy. Narrative story telling across platforms or value added content isn’t a priority for Chinese companies, and the ideas that Pure Grass films were bringing felt like a revelation to some of the people we met.
I was really impressed with the welcoming and informal approach of most of the companies we met. there was a real hunger for new content and new ways to engage audiences. There is a great creative exchange about to happen, that will have us all rushing to Shanghai and Beijing instead of New York and LA to be our most creative, and make our fortunes on the massive scale China as to offer.
Tags: Chinese media
#1 written by CNA Practice Test July 26th, 2010 at 02:55
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