Mango TV is going further and further on the old path of CNTV

Recently, with the "breast reduction" of "The Empress of China" and the opening of "I Am a Singer 3", Hunan TV has once again caught the attention of the audience and the media. At the same time, Mango TV, which is highly related to Hunan TV, has also attracted everyone's attention through a series of measures.

First, it provided a 360-degree panoramic view of Hunan TV's New Year's Eve concert, then it exclusively broadcast "I Am a Singer 3" on the entire network, and just yesterday, it provided a direct view of the Golden Globe Awards. Judging from its recent actions, Mango TV is increasingly taking on the tone of a video website.

In addition to the recent moves, the page layout of Mango TV is also eye-catching. The mode of focusing on variety shows, TV series, movies and animations while assisting other channels can clearly make people feel the entertainment variety gene of Mango TV. Compared with the complex and old-fashioned page layout of other satellite TV stations, the color matching of Mango TV is also very "Internet style" and very pleasing.

However, after a bad user experience, I suddenly felt that Mango TV might be following the same path as CNTV.

Mango TV's first step to keep up with CNTV: broadcast speed

I vaguely remember that in the early days of video websites, due to objective reasons such as P2P technology, the imperfection of CDN network base stations, and the fact that the "broadband" is not that wide even now, video websites often had freezes when playing their own content, not to mention live broadcasts.

Let me give you an example of how laggy live streaming can be, which now seems like a joke.

I believe everyone has the experience of staying up late to watch football in college, but it seems unusual to hear two cheers every time a goal is scored, with an interval of 5 minutes. I was lucky enough to experience it because the live video broadcast had a very serious delay. Every time the neighboring dormitory shouted after a goal because of the TV, we felt thrilling, after all, you don’t know whether the goal was scored by your favorite team or the opponent. In addition, the occasional pauses due to the Internet speed are also intoxicating.

In the days that followed, as technology developed, video manufacturers continued to update their technology, and our broadband became increasingly broad, the experience of watching live broadcasts was very different from the past. However, when CNTV broadcast the World Cup last year, I felt like I was back in college.

Watching Mango TV again, the live broadcast experience seems to be worse than CNTV. When the first episode of I Am a Singer 3 was broadcast, I could only watch it online because I didn’t have a TV at home. When I opened the live broadcast page of Mango TV’s official website, I began to wait endlessly. About an hour after the show started, I only saw a few clips on the webpage, which totaled no more than 2 minutes. For a moment, I felt like I was watching a trailer of this show.

The most intuitive experience that Mango TV brings me is that it is laggy. As a layman in technology, I don’t understand why 20M bandwidth is not enough to watch a live broadcast. I only understand that it is really laggy.

Mango TV's second step to follow CNTV: content channels

In the previous article, I briefly mentioned the channels of Mango TV. It can be basically confirmed that Mango TV is built with some self-made content of Hunan Satellite TV as the core content, and also has some movies, animation videos and other channels. This seems to be very similar to the content channels of CNTV.

For CNTV, the name on the upper left corner of the website was changed from China Network Television to CCTV.com, which shows that its content is basically sourced from CCTV. As the largest TV station in China, CCTV's advantages in content quantity and quality are self-evident, but even so, CNTV does not seem to benefit from it.

However, as a video website with news as its main content, CNTV must be the leader in the country in terms of news. After all, CCTV's news resources and in-depth reporting capabilities are obvious.

In contrast, Mango TV, as a video website mainly focusing on entertainment content, does not seem to have such obvious advantages in terms of entertainment content.

It is undeniable that Hunan Satellite TV does have a lot of high-quality entertainment variety shows, such as the old show "Happy Camp" (the 22nd episode in 2013 had a total of 900 million online hits), "Day Day Up", the new show "Where Are We Going, Dad?", and the currently airing "I Am a Singer". At the same time, there are also a number of high-quality TV series that have indeed attracted the attention of many users.

However, Hunan TV is not the only one that has entertainment variety shows. During the prime time on Friday alone, several TV stations have more than ten entertainment variety shows competing fiercely. Whether it is Zhejiang TV's "Running Man" or Jiangsu TV's "The Brain" or CCTV's "Sing My Song", these programs have the strength to compete with "I Am a Singer". As for TV dramas, I will not say more, I believe everyone can also feel the fierce competition between the various TV stations.

In this environment, it is questionable whether users will be diverted. After all, under the fragmented time conditions, the loyalty of video watching users is further reduced, and coupled with the rich programs, the user stay time is worrying.

In addition, the originality of variety shows may also become a hurdle for Mango TV's future development. Most people who are familiar with variety shows know that most of the popular shows today are not native. Whether it is "I Am a Singer" or "Running Man", the copyrights are all from abroad. Once the introduction fails, the final result will definitely be terrible. An obvious example is a previous show called "The Voice of China".

Perhaps that is why we can see many original programs on Mango TV. After all, it is not a pleasant feeling to have your fate controlled by others. However, the original programs are still in their infancy, and whether they can be scaled up remains to be seen.

In fact, it is not just Mango TV. Traditional TV stations will almost always encounter technical and content problems when going online. In fact, the transformation theory seems to be in place, namely the slogan of "TV-Internet linkage", but it is indeed difficult to implement. Perhaps the TVEverywhere strategy implemented by traditional American TV media can be used as a reference. By the way, there is also a video website called Hulu that is worth studying.

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.