TVAPlus: Metan has been in China for about two years and you’ve worked on a number of General Entertainment shows. What challenges do you face developing these ideas for China’s massive audience? There are certainly a lot of cultural differences that have to be dealt with and also just plain experience in international markets. For example when we fi rst started Hello Hollywood showbiz news programme we quickly learned that what the Chinese audience wants to know about Hollywood is very different from what an American audience wants. In the U.S, TMZ has become the benchmark for this kind of programming. In China they are much less interested in this ‘let’s dig up some dirt and ruin someone’s life’ kind of approach. They want to understand more about how people live, their family life, being a celebrity. Having come out of the early days of E! where the network was really about celebrating the entertainment industry, HH works much better for me personally. Then there is the simple thing of realizing that the China market didn’t grow up with American media and that you have to provide context. When we were first testing concepts for HH we did a short piece on the King Kong ride at Universal Studios. If we did it in the U.S it would have been a one minute piece but because we pace slower in China we did it as two minutes. The folks we tested it on said “Interesting ride, but who is King Kong?” So we went back and added another two minutes on who King Kong is and his place in Western cinema history. The response was “Ok, now we understand who King Kong is but tell us, what Universal Studios is?” So now it came to six minutes after we added that. Adding context and back story is very important. TVAPlus: You came up with an interesting relationship with China’s pirate community for Hello Hollywood. How did this come about and what were the benefi ts of such an agreement? When we launched the show we were fully aware of the problem of piracy in China. Our concern was not so much DVD’s but rather online piracy. Rather than just leave everything to chance we decided to be proactive and call all the pirate portals in China and offer them a deal. HH is on TV Saturday at 10pm and repeated Sunday at noon. The deal was we would give them a legal license for free but we would upload the show to them only on Monday, after its ‘TV window’. They would have to take our show as is, with our ads intact but then they could sell in front or in back. Thirteen of the top portals agreed to this deal. We now get about half a million downloads a week. Since we started HH over a year ago, there has been a very noticeable crackdown on online piracy and a big effort to legally license content. For us charging for the license will be a 2012 agenda item. For now it’s a nice bonus to our advertisers. TVAPlus: What other type of programmes do you see working in China or are lacking in the current TV landscape? There are lots of areas that are opening up in China TV and fi lm. Right now we think there is a good potential for home/renovation related shows. People are buying homes and apartments now. The numbers are astronomical in terms of how many people are entering into home ownership. So there is a market for this genre, that go from simple decorating to gardening to do-it yourself projects. There has never been a need for this before but now there is. We also see a big area for growth in the creation of new shows that are made specifi cally for the China audience. China was copying foreign shows, then they were buying formats, the next step is in creating properties that are uniquely Chinese. There are things about growing up and living in China that are not part of other cultures. I wrote and am now working on an original China-based sitcom, so we’ll see how that goes. TVAPlus: What is your view on the current climate of China’s television and how the industry has changed there, accessibility – is there a TV market? (I ask this as it’s still quite hard to get local based channels to speak about this)? In the two years since Metan was formed the market has defi nitely become more sophisticated in terms of technical and creative. We have always found the climate is good here, basically because of the way we approached the market. Metan has no interests outside of making things work in terms of bringing projects into China and also creating things in China that can be taken to the rest of the world. We don’t believe in taking what we may do in the U.S or Australia and trying to replicate it in China. It doesn’t work. I have likened the experience in China to going to visit my 84-year-old mother in Florida. When I visit she tells me that dinner is at 5.30pm. When I say that I don’t eat until 8pm she reminds me that I am a guest in her house and that they are the rules. It’s the same as when I worked in Russia and now China. We are guests and there are rules. We haven’t found anything so onerous that we couldn’t abide by. I think for a lot of Western media folks it’s been more of a problem of their egos than the climate being harsh. There are lots of opportunities to do things. Hello Hollywood is syndicated (barter) to 54 TV stations. That’s a pretty new model. The online world has also grown to more than 450 million users, getting the attention of brands and their dollars. TVAPlus: You have a specifi c team of TV professionals working in your U.S offi ce, what were your reasons for putting such a team together? Our LA team is quite unique. The vast majority are folks that have been born and raised in mainland China and have fi nished one degree there and at least one other outside of China. Many of them want to learn Western media practices and then return to China. For us this is great since we have a strong pool of people who understand the audience in China and guide all of the creative development activities. More importantly we are training this talent pool to work in China. We have already had one person go back. They not only are great assets themselves but also help the Beijing team grow and adapt by being coaches and teachers.
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