Upgrading "Internet Plus" Movie and TV Entertainment

ZJU alumna Hodan (right) wont the Best Domentary Award for her film Africans in Yiwu.

Online movies and television series have been increasingly popular in China, attracting capital giants into this massvie industry. By the end of 2016, the number of online video users in China had reached nearly 550 million, and the total market volume had reached RMB 60 billion (US$ 9 billion).

Against the backdrop of this “mass carnival” of China’s online movie and TV industry, more and more attention is being drawn to the need of content refining.

On December 10, more than 500 media practitioners, scholars and students converged at Zhejiang University for the Second China Network Movie and Television Forum, whose theme was “Upgrading Internet + Movie and Television Entertainment”. The forum was co-organized by ZJU’s College of Media and International Culture and the China News Service (CNS), the second largest state-owned news agency in the country.

ZHENG Qiang, deputy Party secretary of ZJU, addressed the summit. He said the most important thing for a journalist is “to learn to capture and concentrate” good stories. He hoped the students would contribute to the development of the media industry with their passion, energy and dreams.

WANG Min, deputy editor-in-chief of CNS, said “industry threshold improvement”, “differentiated competition”, and “content refining” are becoming the buzzwords in the online movie and television industry.

The CNS will shoulder the crucial mission of guiding mainstream values and delivering a positive outlook, WANG said. He added that the CNS will build a platform for industry elites to communicate and cooperate.

XU Zhiyi, CEO of Media Trust, outlined the changes brought by the rise of the Internet. He said the Internet not only facilitates the growth of entertainment but also generates more job opportunities for the younger generation.

WU Jing, CEO of Tmeng, looked at market statistics and pointed out that China is yet to unleash the potentials of paid users, a relatively small number (100 million) as compared with the country’s 1.4 billion population. “We can further stimulate that with more excellent online works,” she said.

View Trailer: Africans in Yiwu

Among other notable works, Africans in Yiwu won the Best Documentary Award. The documentary investigates the lives of the African community in the City of Yiwu, China, home to the world’s largest small commodity market and the second largest African population in China. Hodan, the Somali producer, is a ZJU PhD graduate in Communication Studies.

For more details of the forum, please contact Ms. JIANG Panpan, international program coordinator at the College of Media and International Culture.