TV industry celebrates year's successes, studies challenges

Chinese actors Mei Ting and Chen Baoguo (above) are winners at this year's Flying Apsaras Awards.[Photo/CFP]

From Jia's point of view, Nirvana in Fire represents how China's history TV series directors are using online novels as references rather than orthodox literature, bringing new thought to the industry.

Shi Tongyu, a media researcher with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, agrees that the impact of the Internet has become inevitable for TV series in China. "2015 witnessed Internet-based TV series beginning to win acceptance from mainstream critics."

The industry has to accept that the involvement of the Internet has changed how TV series are made, and the trend will continue, Shi says.

Huace TV & Film, a Hangzhou-based studio and a host of the forum, announced on Sunday it will introduce big-data analyses to decide the cast of its upcoming remake of the martial arts classic, The Legend of the Condor Heroes.

"We want to give the right to netizens to decide who will play the lead roles," says Chen Pinxiang, a producer of Huace. "Online games derived from the TV series will be simultaneously developed."

It is only a part of the group's ambitious plan to promote many fantasy TV series, which Ye Zhaojun, another producer with Huace, explains will echo the young generation's pursuit of individualism.

The whole industry is talking about how to get good intellectual property to develop more derivatives.

"Nevertheless, as a broadcast server, Internet-based content is still unable to replace generations of TV producers' aspirations. The professional TV series-production process is still needed," says Shi, who doubts the prediction that the industry will be soon dominated by Internet tycoons.

But Zhu Xiangyang, chief content officer of Youku Tudou, a major online-video broadcaster, predicts that all TV series bred online with low quality will naturally be eliminated in 2016 as more elite teams begin to gather in cyberspace.

"Since online series have begun to charge rather than offer free service in 2015, more content of higher quality will appear," he says.