BEIJING - Guo
Tianshu has worked as an entertainment editor for
the past seven years, but has never stayed at one
company for long. Before 2000, she worked for
Theater and Cinema, a Beijing-based weekly
newspaper. She then joined Netease and later Sina,
two of the biggest Web portals in China, where she
edited their movie channels.
Last year,
she abruptly left her high-paying job for a
little-known startup whose website was unveiled
last week: Mtime is a community site complete with
weblogs and digital magazines. In other words, one
of the best-placed entertainment editors in Beijing has moved from
the print medium to the Internet, and then from
old-fashioned portal sites to Web 2.0, the "new
new media" in vogue today.
Guo's career
path is shared by a group of upwardly
mobile
trailblazers and reflects a
trend in China's media industry.
"I didn't
plan it this way, but maybe I have an antenna to
pick up signals of the latest 'it' thing," Guo
said.
In China, print is being overtaken
by digital dreams: at the end of last year, the
country had 110 million Internet users, with 64.3
million on broadband, and that number keeps
growing. Last year was also the first time revenue
for the print medium dipped significantly for some
companies.
The rise of new media is being
driven by a whirlwind of capital. Toodou.com,
positioned as "a personal multimedia platform",
raised more than US$100 million in venture capital
in just 13 months after its founding.
"We
are still searching for a business model that will
enable us to turn a profit," said Chen Weijia,
marketing director. "The cost of handling
multimedia content is much more expensive. For
text, thousands of words may take up only a few
kilobytes, but one second of a podcast will
require a few megabytes. That's why we need to set
up a stable platform for our users."
Old dogs learn new tricks Old
media gurus are not sitting idle either. They are
taking action to defend their turf and, more often
than not, jumping into the fray. A podcasting
website, Radio.cn, set up last July raised $9
million from Softbank and $1 million from WI
Harper Group, leaving China National Radio with
the controlling stake of 51%.
This April,
China Central Television (CCTV) launched its
Internet protocol television (IPTV) service. "You
can watch the hottest serial drama from the CCTV
lineup, get the texts of their stories,
behind-the-scenes snippets and interviews. You can
also subscribe to a service and download photos
and video segments from the shows to your mobile
phone," said Cheng Hong, CCTV's deputy
editor-in-chief.
In the traditional medium
of television, CCTV holds a monopoly as the only
national network, with 15 satellite channels. Last
year, it earned 12.4 billion yuan ($1.5 billion),
of which 8.6 billion yuan was from advertising. By
contrast, Hunan Satellite Television, with its
runaway hit Super Girls, picked up only 600
million yuan in advertising.
But in the
realm of new media, CCTV does not enjoy such a
privileged position, as it has to compete with a
slew of operators. Shanghai Media Group
(SMG) got an IPTV license one year earlier than
CCTV. And as content providers, they all have to
fight for the platforms, in this case the cable
networks controlled by local television stations.
Since new-media content will gobble up
bandwidth, cable operators who build and operate
the "thick pipes" are in a better bargaining
position.
"It is unlikely anyone can
dominate the market as [is true] in traditional
television," said Cheng. "How CCTV can realize its
dream of becoming the nation's biggest platform of
content aggregation remains to be seen. CCTV.com
will be an open platform. We can build our own
channels or form partnerships with others."
As television broadcasting has never been
subject to ownership reform, private programming
production companies have always been left to
fight on their own and with no recourse to a
platform. As a result, they have the incentive to
embrace new media.
Enlight Media Company
established itself by producing a program with
up-to-date reporting on the nation's entertainment
scene and syndicating it to hundreds of television
stations.
"When the channel is not part of
the free market, it is impractical to see content
as the king," said Wang Changtian, president of
Enlight. "Some opportunities simply don't belong
to non-state-owned enterprises like us."
Always on the prowl for new opportunities,
Enlight branched into new media last year in the
hope that its strength in television programming
would cross over to Internet television. Nowadays
it refuses to be identified as a "television
content provider".
In 1994, when most
Chinese knew little about the Internet, China
Daily entered the digital age, becoming the
country's first national newspaper to go online.
Today, ChinaDaily.com.cn has about 6 million page
views per day, it is one of the world's top media
websites, and its English-language forum has the
largest number of registered users in the country.
It aims to become a leading multimedia news,
information and service provider.
Personal media The eruption of
blogs was a watershed event for 2005. Although the
major blog-hosting sites were injected with large
doses of capital, bloggers and their readers were
galvanized by a desire for self-expression, and in
a few cases calculated moves of exhibitionism.
It is estimated that the total number of
weblogs in China will reach 15.2 million this year
and almost double to 28.6 million in 2007. But
will this drown out traditional media with their
trained editors, reporters and resources? Many
people, including some of the best bloggers, doubt
it.
A click through the blogosphere will
reveal that the majority of blogs are personal
journals in the style of high-school girls'
diaries. A typical blog has total clicks in a few
hundreds, and if comments are any indication, the
readers are young people with nothing better to do
but "grab the sofa", an online euphemism for
leaving the first comment for a posting.
However, there are a few blogs that have
built up reputations to rival those of mainstream
media brands. Besides Xu Jinglei, the actress with
the most-read blog, Wang Xiaofeng's "Massage Milk"
comments on cultural and social news; Hong Bo's
"Keso" deals with what's happening in the
technology field; and Roland Soong's "ESWN", or
"EastSouthWestNorth", aggregates and translates
China-related news and offers observations with
cross-cultural acumen.
These are some of
the best blogs, and they are mostly run by media
professionals. However, the bloggers tend to
differentiate their day jobs from their blogging
hobby.
"The information presented on my
blog is partial, selective and idiosyncratic,"
Soong explained. "A blog is the effort of a single
individual and may excel in some small niche
subject area or in reporting a suddenly breaking
incident."
Brave new world When
blogging was extended to include audio-visual
content, podcasts, digital magazines, video
streaming and a slew of other new-media platforms
were born. Digital magazines are a popular feature
on Web 2.0 community sites, and since they are
freely downloaded and are close in appearance to
print publications, it is often predicted that
they will eclipse their print brethren in the near
future.
According to iResearch, a
consulting firm, 2005 was the year digital
magazines caught the public's attention. It
estimated that there were 20 million readers last
year, and that number will grow to 32 million this
year and 82 million by 2010.
The market
size in terms of revenue was a paltry 20 million
yuan for 2005, the same study indicated. But it
will snowball to 100 million yuan by the end of
this year and 1.25 billion yuan by 2010. The
top platforms where digital mags are distributed
include Xplus, ZCOM, Magbox and VIKA. Lan, by
television celebrity and businesswoman Yang Lan,
is the Chinese equivalent of O magazine, published
by US television mogul Oprah Winfrey. After its
debut last December, it got 2.1 million downloads
in four months, about 10 times the circulation of
a successful print magazine targeting adult women.
Although Internet-related statistics are
famously unreliable, it is conceivable that a
digital magazine with all the bells and whistles
of sound effects, music, flash and links can reach
an audience inaccessible to print titles.
"If a digital mag can have half a million
subscribers, it can survive for the time being,"
said Li Xiguang, a media expert at Tsinghua
University.
Yao Hong, chief executive
officer of POCO, an online platform for digital
magazines flush with venture capital from
International Data Group, highlighted the strength
of a digital music magazine: "For example, the
current issue features a pop singer who has a new
album coming out. Our readers can sample the
tracks, read the lyrics and watch accompanying
cartoons. They can even peek behind the scenes to
see how the album was put together."
For
all the hoopla, the billion-dollar question
remains: Will readers be willing to pay for their
subscriptions in an environment where a free lunch
is the norm, or will advertising be able to
sustain continuous free downloading?
One
new-media platform that has resolved this problem
is the mobile telephone. China had 380 million
mobile-phone users by the end of last year, and
they all pay for their services, whether basic
connection or additional content.
In the
"messaging and personal entertainment" category,
ubiquitous text messaging accounted for 80% of
total revenue, racking up 30 billion yuan in 2005.
Jokes have been the pillar of palm entertainment,
which is able to add sound and video capabilities.
Therefore, mobile-phone radio, television and
films are all new forms of entertainment that are
being explored as the potential "next big thing".
For the time being, mobile-phone
newspapers are zapping through the airwaves one by
one from print-media organizations, ever since
China Women's Newspaper launched its edition in
2004. In the current business model, content
providers get 60% of the revenue, and
mobile-network operators take the rest.
So, what will be the "killer application"
for Web 2.0? Will new media complement old media
or threaten its survival? Will it capture the
imagination of the young generation, who will then
see print as the media equivalent of the silent
movie?
One thing is definite: News, views
or entertainment will require the handling of
media professionals, no matter whether in print or
online. A good example of this comes in the case
of Pingke and Flypig, who run a podcast,
Antiwave.net, out of their Beijing apartment. It
has gathered a cult following and won an
international prize by offering a mix of audio
programming, ranging from news analysis and humor
to dissections of mainstream magazines.
But in the real world, Jiang Hong (Pingke)
works for a weekly newsmagazine and Lin Jiashu
(Flypig) for a business newspaper. With their day
jobs in the print medium, they have their feet
firmly planted in the ground of journalistic
discipline, while aspiring for something that
showcases their individuality.
It also
helps that for 19 years Jiang was a popular
radio-show host in Tianjin and has top-notch
recording and mixing equipment to boot. "You
cannot take off with new media," he said, "without
building yourself up in the old."
