Paid sports TV faces challenges in China

‍‍The Chinese sports content market is getting more and more competitive as more and more online media platforms joined the field. This month, there are two crucial events -- FIFA Women’s World Cup and Copa America. Letv Sports will fully live broadcast the events, competing with traditional TV media who would only broadcast a part of the events. On the other hand, the opponent of Letv Sports, PPTV, just announced that it would organize an independent company for its sports channel and attract funds for it. 

Letv, Tencent, and PPTV have created fierce competition in the field of event rights. Industry expert says that the recent large investments would for sure lead to paid broadcasts and internet television would be the major platform for such paid broadcasts. However, if there were not sufficient users, the bubble would burst very easily. 

Ma Guoli, the President of Infront China and the former Chief of CCTV 5, said that paid TV needs a few conditions to succeed in China. 

The first one is that the country must allow paid TVs. The second one is to have techniques to enable operators to interact with individual users at terminals. Thirdly, there must be high-quality content that can satisfy users so that they have enough motivations to pay. Lastly, there should be sufficient funds and long-term profit plans. 

At the present stage, due to inadequate techniques, a lack of exclusive content, and uncomfortable user experience, there is still a long way to go for paid TVs in China. 

It is revealed that the number of audiences for live online streaming of some events was less than 10,000 people; some events were not populous enough to attract major advertisings. These events were very likely to be given up by broadcasters after being broadcast for a while. 

The least number of users for Chinese internet TV would be 100 million, according to Ma Guoli. He said that, if half of them were willing to pay, there would be enough fund to be given to event organizations and Chinese sports would also benefit. 

If the number only reached millions, it would be risky for investors as well as the companies themselves, because once funds ran out these companies would be likely to fail overnight, which means the bubble would burst and have disastrous impact on Chinese market.