China TV studios form alliance to boost TV drama exports

HANGZHOU, Dec. 27 (Xinhua) -- Several Chinese TV drama production studios formed an alliance Tuesday to jointly help export Chinese web series.

Ten Chinese film and TV studios, including China's leading entertainment producers Huace Film&TV, H. Brothers and iQIYI, jointly launched the Chinese TV Drama (Web Series) Export Alliance, at the 2017 China Film Television Art Innovation Summit, held in Hangzhou, capital of eastern China's Zhejiang Province.

You Xiaogang, chair of Beijing Jingdu Century Culture Development, said the company joined the alliance so it could share in the professional export platform.

He said prices of exported Chinese TV dramas were much lower than those produced by the Republic of Korea as well as European and American countries.

"This is due to the small export scale and dispersed marketing channels," he said.

China's export of TV dramas reached 510 million yuan (77.8 million U.S. dollars) in 2016, jumping from 380 million in 2015.

Meng Yifei, director of the Film and Television Research Institute with the Huace Group, said that although the exports were still small in scale, they had been growing fast and securing initial achievements in European, American and African markets, in addition to the traditional export markets in Asia.

The world's leading Internet television network Netflix acquired three Chinese web dramas earlier this month, including the detective series "Day and Night," which has been eyed to show the potential of Chinese dramas to enter the mainstream foreign entertainment market. Enditem