How New Year's Eve became a mobile carnival

The just concluded Spring Festival Gala of the Year of the Rooster has once again become a hot topic of discussion. People have different opinions on whether the show is good or bad, but one thing is certain: the Spring Festival Gala is becoming more and more closely integrated with the mobile Internet.

You may first think of the dazzling lights controlled by computers on the stage, or the drone performances that have appeared for two consecutive years. However, it is some other guys who really make the Spring Festival Gala a carnival on the Internet.

For example, after the emergence of WeChat, you would choose to share your views and complaints about the Spring Festival Gala in WeChat Moments. You may also remember the "shake" red envelope and "collect five blessings red envelope" activities, which made you pick up your phone and shake and take photos.

The Internet has deeply penetrated into the stage of the Spring Festival Gala, and the way we consume the Spring Festival Gala has also been changed accordingly.

The rapid spread of red envelopes for Chinese New Year greetings

The Spring Festival Gala has always hoped to strengthen its interaction with the audience, especially to attract the attention of young people. With limited program innovation, combining it with mobile Internet products such as "red envelopes" has become its biggest highlight in the past few years.

WeChat Pay, which emerged with the red envelopes during the Spring Festival in 2014, hopes to continue its hot momentum in 2015. It chose to cooperate deeply with the Spring Festival Gala, which is the most popular but urgently needs new highlights, and launched a series of "shake" red envelope activities on New Year's Eve.

The entire red envelope activity started at 9 a.m. on New Year's Eve. During the live broadcast of CCTV News Channel's special program "Year after Year", WeChat allowed users to shake out a small number of red envelopes with random amounts, blessings and interactive pages, paving the way for the evening's Spring Festival Gala. After the "Year of the Goat Spring Festival Gala" began, WeChat users could use WeChat's "Discover-Shake" portal to grab WeChat cash red envelopes worth more than 500 million yuan provided by corporate sponsors.

This carefully planned red envelope activity became the most successful "program" of the "Year of the Goat Spring Festival Gala", and it also allowed the Spring Festival Gala to have close contact with the mobile Internet represented by smartphones for the first time, successfully expanding its influence. According to official data provided by WeChat, the total number of WeChat red envelopes sent and received on New Year's Eve reached 1.01 billion times. From 20:00 to 0:48 this morning, the total number of WeChat shake interactions during the Spring Festival Gala reached 11 billion times, with the peak interaction occurring at 22:34, reaching 810 million times per minute.

After the huge success of the cooperation between WeChat and the Spring Festival Gala, Alibaba 's Alipay and Sina Weibo successively became partners of the 2016 "Year of the Monkey Spring Festival Gala" and the 2017 "Year of the Rooster Spring Festival Gala", taking over the "red envelope rain" on New Year's Eve.

In addition to launching several rounds of cash red envelopes sponsored by different companies at different times, the payment package also launched a new "collect five red envelopes", and you can share 215 million red envelopes by collecting all five. This year, Sina Weibo organized the strongest red envelope lineup consisting of celebrities + media + companies + Internet celebrities KOLs, and distributed red envelopes worth 1 billion on Weibo.

It can be said that after several years of market cultivation, grabbing red envelopes with mobile phones has become a standard feature of the "Spring Festival Gala", and red envelope activities in cooperation with Internet companies have also become a new label of the Spring Festival Gala.

Online interaction and live streaming

The advent of the Internet and mobile era has ended the days of television when the whole family, young and old, sat on the sofa to watch the Spring Festival Gala. People are becoming more and more accustomed to finding the feeling of the New Year on screens of different sizes.

In order to meet the needs of the audience, CCTV launched the online Spring Festival Gala in 2011. In the past few years, it has expanded the influence of the Spring Festival Gala on the Internet through cooperation with CNTV, iQiyi, Mango TV, Sina Weibo, etc. Therefore, in the past few years, you can see various topics related to the Spring Festival Gala on Weibo and see clips of the Spring Festival Gala on video websites. For those viewers who don’t want to sit in front of the TV and watch for several hours, the Internet provides them with another channel to contact the Spring Festival Gala.

Three years ago, CCTV began to open up live broadcast rights to the Internet. The video platforms that obtained the live broadcast rights not only wanted to be the first platform for audiences to watch the Spring Festival Gala, but also hoped to use the topic of "Spring Festival Gala" to bring enough popularity to the platform throughout the Spring Festival, so they made key investments in content.

In 2015, iQiyi obtained the first live broadcast rights for the Spring Festival Gala, mobilizing all resources of the site, including variety shows, entertainment, and self-produced programs. In addition to the special program "Face to Face with the Spring Festival Gala", it also produced a number of self-produced programs such as "iQiyi Early Flight", "Entertainment Looking Back", and "Entertainment Big Events", reporting on the planning and rehearsal of CCTV's Spring Festival Gala in the Year of the Sheep and other exciting stories on and off the stage.

This year, Sina Weibo will broadcast the CCTV Spring Festival Gala live program @春晚 simultaneously with CCTV.com, and CCTV.com's official Weibo will also broadcast @春晚 simultaneously with CCTV.com through Weibo. The program will invite Spring Festival Gala stars to the interactive studio as soon as possible to interact with netizens through video and interpret the latest and hottest Spring Festival Gala comments on Weibo that night.

In addition to cooperating with Internet platforms, the Spring Festival Gala itself is also strengthening its ties with mobile Internet.

2016 is known as the first year of live broadcasting, and the theme of this year's online Spring Festival Gala is "New Year's Happiness Online Live Broadcasting", which is the first time that the concept and technology of online live broadcasting have been applied to the gala. For example, when Cai Guoqing sang "365 Blessings", the live broadcast of the program connected three families in Ruijin, Jiangxi, Qiandongnan, Guizhou, and Liangjiahe, Yan'an.

Some netizens choose to watch the Spring Festival Gala with anchors and "water friends" on live broadcast websites. Even if the program is not exciting, everyone posts comments together, which has become a new fashion for watching the Spring Festival Gala.

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.