Zhang Wei CCTV (© IAAF)
It is my honour and privilege to give a brief presentation here on behalf of China Central Television. Based in Beijing, CCTV is the biggest Television Station in China, run by the government. I highly value this opportunity to be able to communicate with the most important, experienced and knowledgeable personalities from around the world. Because of the well-known fact that the 2008 Olympics will be held in Beijing. I believe most of you present today will be more or less involved in cooperation with CCTV. So please allow me to first brief you on CCTV and CCTV Sports
First of all, I want to present to you an overview of CCTV. Currently CCTV is operating 15 channels with a resource of 400,000 hours of programming and 300-plus programs, CCTV has a daily broadcasting time of 270 hours, among which 68% are produced by itself. Covering 90% of the Chinese population, CCTV boasts of an audience exceeding 1.1 billion people. In recent years, the average daily viewing time of CCTV programming has reached 61.21 minutes. CCTV is the first Chinese TV station to conduct experiments of high-definition television and interactive television technologies. CCTV is also planning to launch video-on-demand and pay-TV service.
Secondly, let me give you an overview of CCTV Sports. CCTV Sports is the first specialized channel of CCTV, broadcasting from January 1st, since 1995. We are going to celebrate our 10th anniversary. CCTV Sports was chosen to conduct the interactive TV programs by CCTV two years ago, recently the CCTV Sports Interactive has developed 6 channels and each channel broadcasts 6 hours programs per day. And we also broadcast 2 channels of pay-TV, namely city-sports channel and football channel. Our fast expansion benefits a lot from the fact that CCTV has the exclusive broadcast rights in China for most of the world’s major sports events including the Olympic Games, FIFA World Cup, F1, world championships in basketball, volleyball, table tennis, IAAF World Championship, among others.
There are not enough athletics stars and high level competitions in track and field in China, unlike football or basketball, to provide a solid base for a regular program in CCTV Sports. CCTV Sports has tried its best to make use of each opportunity to appeal to a larger audience in track and field.
Over the past 10 years CCTV Sports has experienced fast development. There are, however, a limited number of famous Chinese athletics stars. The following is the introduction of the two most renowned. Huang Zhihong, was the first gold medal winner of Asian athletics in IAAF World Championships in the shot put. Wang Junxia, the first Asian athlete who was given the Jesse Owens Awards. She won in the World Championships in 1993 and got a gold medal in the Atlanta Olympics. They are now often invited as guest commentators for CCTV Sports.
During the Athens Olympic Games, Liu Xiang , just like the flyers duel in the 100 metres arena, will be the focus of both CCTV and hundreds of millions Chinese viewers. He just won a silver medal in the 10th IAAF Indoor Championship on March 7th. At the same time, Liu Xiang will be the focus of Asians as well in the bigger sense, because this event of the 110 metre hurdles used to be dominated by North America and Europe. It is our hope that the competition schedule may give more consideration to the time difference between Athens and Beijing (Athens is 6 hours behind Beijing).The Chinese viewers will feel lucky if they could watch live coverage of the Chinese athletics stars competitions before midnight.
Sun Yingjie and Gu Yuan are the other two Chinese athletics stars who are hoping to win medals in the Athens Olympics. In August, for the Chinese athletics team, we don’t think that there will be any more breakthroughs in the events of track and field than they were in the Atlanta and Sydney Olympics. So CCTV will focus on these Chinese athletics stars to let the Chinese viewers feel more directly with the event. Mr. Lou Dapeng, the Vice President of IAAF, may know better than me about the development strategy in the track and field events of the Chinese Olympic Committee. One of them is to introduce more Chinese athletes into track and field events for the 2008 Olympic Games, so that a larger Chinese audience will be drawn to follow athletics either in the stadium or on television. During this time, CCTV will do more than it used to do in this field.
There are many challenges faced by us in the field of TV sports. We are trying to meet some of them. CCTV will be in charge of the international signal production of Table tennis, Badminton and Modern Pentathlon during the Athens Olympics, and we hope that we can do more for Beijing 2008 Olympics. But we must prove our competence by providing good quality signals for IAAF World Junior Championships 2006, which will be held in Beijing. The CCTV Sports will adhere to the guideline of “handing down civilization of Olympics, making exploration and innovation of TV production.” to satisfy the audience’s need.
CCTV has launched its New Site Project, in a bid to make the best of the opportunities produced by the 2008 Olympics. On completion, the CCTV New Site will be both a landmark building of the Chinese Capital and a world-class media industry centre. In four years, most of you will come to Beijing and I believe that CCTV will be proud to provide you with the technical supports and work with you at that time.
