Tony Perkins guiding the group.

Imagine a city with 16 separate districts. Each district communicates in a different language, exchanges a different currency, and drives different cars. The city has one leader, one voice. This is CCTV, or China Central Television.  On Wednesday our group was lucky enough to tour the CCTV complex in Beijing. What goes on behind the scenes is truly incredible.

Our tour began at the security gate where an armed guard (Police and security guards do not carry guns and citizens cannot own one) lined us up only allowing us to enter the compound one at a time. Tony Perkins, a sports anchor and reporter for the English CCTV channel, CCTV News International (or CCTV 9) was gracious enough to give us a tour of the facilities. We started out by visiting the studios where CCTV broadcasts 24 hours a day, 7 days a week on 16

different channels. The channels cover everything from Finance to Sports to Movies to Law to News. We learned that CCTV broadcasts in Chinese, English, Spanish, French, Russian, and Arabic, each having its own channel. The language channels all have news programs, sports programs, and general variety programs. You can imagine the amount of programming. We were fortunate enough to visit the CCTV News International live set.

Stepping onto the newly built set was eerily familiar to a set back home. Except for the few Chinese sentences written on the wall I would have thought we were back home. During our time the crew was setting up it for the special World Cup show to be broadcast later this week. As an anchor walked in we were ushered into the control room to witness the hourly newscast.

CCTV News live set.

While all of the anchors on CCTV News International speak English, some do not speak Chinese. Typically in the control room the producer of the show will speak English to the anchor while the rest of the crew communicates in Chinese. The layout of the control room took everyone by surprise. Instead of going back in depth, the control room was simply one very long desk in front of monitors. Everyone from the TD to the sound is placed in front of this long desk. This was the case out of the four or so control rooms we toured. Suzy even noticed CNN was tuned in on a monitor! We suddenly became very appreciative of Ball States facilities as we discovered CCTV News was still editing on DVCPro tape machines and playing them back for broadcast.

Next we were shown a huge auditorium studio, the largest at the complex. CCTV 5 Sports was gearing up for World Cup 2010 coverage inside of it. Apparently every three or four weeks a new set is built for various shows with performers coming from around the country to be on TV. It is also the location of the famous New Years show that has a 90% market share across China.

CCTV's large studio set.

Finally we made our way into the great office tower. Our group was able to talk to several people working on different shows for CCTV and even ran into an intern who attended school at DePauw University in Indiana! This floor definitely had the hustle and bustle of a newsroom with everyone busy at work. Several English to Chinese dictionaries were spread about as writers prepared their shows in English.

Overall our tour of CCTV couldn’t have been better. To visit a media empire that broadcasts on 16 different channels that reach over 1 billion people was unforgettable. Special thanks again to Tony for giving us such a great tour.

P.S. Should you have the urge to watch some of CCTV’s quality programming, all CCTV channels are free at http://english.cntv.cn/live/