The Study On The Development Of Provincial SAT-TVs

With the increased globalization of economy, culture and communication of information as well as China's participation in WTO, western TV media are striving to enter the media market of China, dumping programs or landing whole channels via SAT-TV to claim their territories in the Chinese TV market. By sharp contrast, due to the administrative, regional, conceptual, and interest barriers, CCTV is the only dominator of the domestic market by its nationwide TV network. So a market with its full mechanism of competition is not yet established. The whole productivity of the domestic TV market is comparatively incompetent when trying to enter the global market. Therefore, it is of great significance to establish a new order of Chinese TV industry by encouraging competitive cooperation and coordinating development so as to prepare and propel the domestic TV industry into the global market.During the period from 1989 to 1999, all the 31 provincial TVs have launched their satellite channels, which has formed the basic hierarchy of the domestic TV network: CCTV—provincial SAT-TVs—provincial ground TVs—local TVs. As a result, an interconnected network of national SAT-TVs and a national TV market is being built. The provincial TVs are the crucial components of the Chinese TV industry, and only provincial SAT-TVs are physically equipped for cross-regional development. Whether they can make compound reactions on this basis and continue to develop bears much on the overall enhancement and breakthrough potentials of the Chinese TV industry.Aided by the satellite technology, the provincial SAT-TVs are able to maintain full local coverage as well as partial interprovincial coverage. Theoretically, possessed with great derivational values, they are not only able to excel in the advantageous local market, but also compete on the regional or even national level. Provincial SAT-TVs are designed according to the administrative divisions, with the fundamental responsibility to publicize their own provinces. Strongly demonstrating their enterprise characteristics, they have limited their management range within the provinces, which determines that the majority of the current provincial SAT-TVs are designed as news-integration channels and aimed at the popular market. This in turn makes provincial SAT-TVs more locally oriented. In addition, the dependence of provincial SAT-TVs on their provinciality has subjected their development to the local economy and culture, which will dwarf their market values. Under this situation, the provincial SAT-TVs will unavoidably be inclined to make homogenous competitions.With the development of the market economy, provincial SAT-TVs have made remarkable processes on advertising management, and most of them are trying to seekout-provincial opportunities. Thus provincial SAT-TVs have become the key for provincial broadcast and TV industries to make expansions. Nonetheless, the problems like "more government, less business" and "more direction, less management" during the development of the domestic SAT-TV have made the provincial SAT-TVs poorly identified and incompetent. As a result, they have to compete with CCTV, ground channels, city TVs, overseas media, new media and other rivals in various fields, such as channel coverage, content management, value positioning, advertisement etc. Therefore, whether the SAT-TVs are sufficiently competitive is crucial for attracting advertisement clients, which becomes one of the goals of their development.Overall, the cultivation of the competitiveness has to rely on the macroscopic variables of technology and policy, which have put provincial SAT-TVs in a dilemma: how to balance the public role and the business role. During the transitional period of economy, this difficulty has given rise to more problems in the development of provincial SAT-TVs, such as the ambiguous role of broadcasting platform and/or content integrator, the impact of coverage uniqueness on the production and structure of upriver programs, the under-segmentation of the audience market and the monotonicity of programs and income structure. As the successful development of provincial SAT-TVs must achieve definite identifications, several problems have to be solved: Should the administrative factor be strengthened or weakened? Should the profit factor be clarified or blurred? Should the legal factor be secured or detained?When assessed by the important competition indices like rate of reception, program competitiveness and integration degree, the overall performance of provincial SAT-TVs is low, demonstrating apparent homogeneity and mass orientation in content. Moreover, provincial SAT-TVs are less competitive beyond the local level. The strengths between provincial SAT-TVs are varies, but their competitions are mediocre. But encouraged and tempted by the market economy, the need of provincial SAT-TVs for expansion is increasingly apparent. Subjectively it is a reflection of the wish to occupy more shares of the market; objectively it is intimately associated with the change of advertising management and the increased awareness of their inherent cross-provincial values. In order to makes expansions, not only the natural monopoly characterized by administrative divisions has to be broken and the structural upgrade of the industry has to be promoted by state policies, but also the provincial SAT-TVs have to make active exploration, individually or collectively.In recent years, the government has provided the fundamental directions for the development and expansion of provincial SAT-TVs. In addition, provincial SAT-TVs have also attempted to make some breakthroughs in content management, channel value...