WeChat Channels, Douyin and Kuaishou to Broadcast CCTV Spring Festival Gala

The annual CCTV Spring Festival Gala in China will be broadcast on WeChat Channels, ByteDance’s Douyin and Kuaishou, among which Douyin may serve as one of the event sponsors, GeekPark reported on January 16. The report added that Douyin itself might be involved in some of the broadcast sketches.

According to sources close to the Spring Festival Gala team, in a break from precedent, four rehearsals have been completed this year, but only a liquor maker appeared as a special sponsor. The chief sponsor of this year’s gala may be Yili Group, a domestic dairy products producer, with a sponsorship fee of over 100 million yuan ($14.8 million).

In 2022, the video channel of Tencent‘s WeChat was used to broadcast the Spring Festival Gala for the first time. More than 120 million people watched the gala on this channel last year.

Win-win interactions between the Spring Festival Gala and domestic internet giants began in 2015. That year, WeChat sponsored the event, and through interactive planning of digital red envelopes by “shaking the phone,” 200 million personal bank cards were bound with WeChat Payment in just two days. After this, the red envelope activity during the Spring Festival Gala became an advertising opportunity for enterprises. After 2015, Alipay served as a sponsor for two consecutive years. Since then, Taobao, Douyin, Baidu and Kuaishou have all acted as sponsors of the innovative activity.

With the addition of more platforms, the amount of sponsorship related to the Spring Festival Gala is rising. In 1984, a watch company called Compas changed 2,000 quartz clocks for the opportunity of naming the event. Now, 40 years later, sponsorship fees have already increased to billions of yuan.

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Beginning in 2022, the Spring Festival Gala has had tighter restrictions on broadcasting and content dissemination. CCTV divides the copyright into several types, including long video livestreaming, recording, short video, and social communication, with prices ranging from tens of millions of yuan to hundreds of millions of yuan. Prior to this, Baidu‘s Haokan Video was sentenced to over 500,000 yuan for broadcasting the 2020 Spring Festival Gala without broadcasting authorization.