SARFT Announces New Broadcast Fair, Smaller Players on the Way Out?

BEIJING--- SARFT has announced plans to create another television program market for Chinese and foreign broadcasters (please refer to 'SARFT Announces Plans for New Programming Festival'). The China International TV Programs Exhibition will be jointly organized by SARFT as well as the China Radio, Film and Television Group  and is slated to be held in Beijing in August 2003.

The new national status event joins a number of others in China including the Shanghai TV Festival, Sichuan TV Festival, Beijing TV Week, the Golden Eagle TV Arts Festival and the recently concluded bi-annual Wuhan TV Science and Technology Programming Festival. Added to these domestic fairs, increasing numbers of mainland participants are attending regional events including HKFilmart, BCWW (South Korea) and ATF (Singapore), while international organisations are starting to organise their own events in China, including DISCOP and CASBAA.

SARFT seems to view having such a variety of television programming festivals held throughout China each year as rather chaotic. Indeed, at the press conference announcing the China International TV Programs Exhibition, SARFT officials hinted that they would like to consolidate China's TV programming conferences in the coming years into, of course, the new conference they are developing.

Can they pull this off?

The jury is still out if SARFT can actually manage to turn the China International TV Program Exhibition into the definitive television programming market in China each year, but there are signs pointing in that direction that may actually result in the opposite.

Firstly, no one should doubt SARFT's ability to ram an unpopular policy decision down the throats of the broadcasting industry. SARFT's initial announcement a few years ago that cable and terrestrial broadcasting facilities should merge into larger media groups as the first step to launching a single national network controlled by SARFT was met with widespread skepticism.

Most industry observers agreed that entrenched interests in the form of local municipal governments that had paid for the roll-out of extensive cable networks would be able to effectively block SARFT from appropriating these assets to build its national media superhighway.

At the start of 2003, while the local media conglomerates have been formed under the continued control of provincial and municipal governments, the national cable network is still not a reality and SARFT now faces resistance from greatly strengthened local opposition.

Secondly, the fact is that, from a distribution prospective, there are indeed too many TV programming festivals in China each year and some of them are maturing into the professional events that the industry really needs. Despite that, China is still a small market in copyright terms. At this month's Science and Technology programming fair, a number of foreign program providers that submitted films for competition and won awards were unable to accept their prizes because, with shrinking budgets and time constraints, it was not on their list of priorities.

Admittedly, the conference was pushed back from its original schedule by one month at the behest of the central government so as not to conflict with the 16th Party Congress. However, a number of participants noted that to attend they missed out on conferences that they would normally have attended. Despite the kudos of winning awards, in future they say they will be forced to pick and choose from the many credible broadcasting conferences happening in China on an economic basis.

For international distributors, the addition of a new market ordered by the national government (without regard for market demand) does not sound attractive. Indeed, as China moves towards WTO compliance, the trend should be towards a lessening of government involvement in commercial activities. This independence may have been achieved in name by operating the event through China Radio, Film and TV Group, but this new organization has no experience in running such events either.

As the major broadcast player in the market, the national group can hardly hope to build the reputation of this fair as "an independent and level playing field" despite international experience that this is essential if it is to become an established venue for world program trade. Indeed, given the success of the permanent office established to operate major events in Shanghai, one wonders why SARFT did not create a similar body to handle its new trade fairs?

Lastly, conference organizers are finding they have to scale back conference programs due to the simple fact that with conference attendees stretched throughout so many conferences, there are not enough conference-goers to go around. For example, Beijing TV week has announced that it will be canceling its equipment section, while Sichuan TV Festival has made a strategic decision to concentrate on factual programming.

SARFT's ability to corral and cajole those in the domestic broadcast industry suggests it has the capability to create the kind of event that foreign program producers will feel compelled to attend one day. But as the Shanghai and Sichuan TV festivals and Beijing TV Week are the only events that international distributors have pencilled into their 2003 budgets, it is also possible that SARFT will quickly lose interest. As long term CMM subscribers will remember, history would suggest the latter.