Many people have been chasing the hit drama "News Queen" recently, and the current online rating of the show has been as high as 80, the popularity of Youku is also ranked first. Yu Shiman also relied on this drama to return to the top position again.
The price of this drama on Youku is as high as 18 yuan, but many people still choose to pay for it and have a look. It is estimated that this drama will drive a lot of Youku's performance this year. However, this is not the case with TVB, which is the producer.
Even if it created a hit like "News Queen", TVB still lost 400 million in the first half of this year, and the company's market value has fallen to 1.4 billion. According to the current rate of loss, it will take more than a year for TVB to lose itself.
At its peak, TVB's market value was as high as 22 billion, but now it has evaporated 20.6 billion, and the cumulative loss in the past five years is as high as 2.2 billion. Run Run Shaw in 2011 ** 26When 5% of TVB's equity is added, the price is as high as 8.6 billion. But now the market value of the entire TVB is only 1.4 billion.
In the post-Shaw era, TVB has entered turmoil, and even many artists asked the company for a salary increase during the Taiwan celebration.
For many people, TVB is definitely a memory of the times. In fact, many people watch TVB TV dramas not through formal channels. At the peak of TVB, many places in the mainland could not receive the signal of its TV station.
Many classic old dramas were originally watched by everyone on pirated CDs. Later, with the Internet, many people made up for these classic TV series in the early years on the Internet. Even now, many of TVB's classic TV series are still made into various second-creation clips by users, and they continue to be spread on online platforms.
So what happened to TVB, and why did it fall from the peak and fall into vicious losses?In fact, even now, TVB still relies on the Hong Kong market to survive.
Although TVB has been exploring the mainland market in the past two years, on the one hand, they have created a high-quality ** program "The Sound of Life" with Hunan TV, and signed a content cooperation of 700 million yuan with Youku, and at the same time, they have also settled in a number of short ** platforms and started live broadcast of Hong Kong goods.
These collaborations are also small successes, for example, on the Douyin platform, their three accounts have a total of 2 million followers and a total of 1.3 million items have been sold. In addition, on the ** live broadcast, from March to September, their cumulative turnover was as high as 2500 million.
In order to make efforts to bring goods through live broadcasts, TVB requires all artists to learn Xi Mandarin, and at the same time, big-name stars also take turns to appear in TVB's live broadcast room, and also use classic drama IP to create a live broadcast room.
But even if you work so hard, TVB's revenue from the mainland in the first half of the year is still only 3300 million, accounting for only 2% of the total income.
In other words, 80% of TVB's revenue still comes from the Hong Kong market. But Hong Kong is only a city of a few million people, and the key Hong Kong market is so big, no matter how hard you try, they are so big.
Therefore, TVB has only two methods, the first is to open up the mainland market, and the second is to save costs.
In terms of cost savings, TVB is definitely at the level of a grandmaster. Since the Shaw era, TVB has been well-known for this. Reduce the cost of artists, program production costs, and so on. We watched a lot of TVB TV dramas, many of the sets were shoddy, and even a rooster bowl prop was reused in many TV series, and the styling of some actors was constantly repeated.
But because of the outstanding acting skills of the actors, coupled with excellent scripts, etc., the old TVB TV series are still classics. Now, in order to save costs, TVB has carried out large-scale layoffs this year, laying off about 8% of its employees in June, resulting in 300 job losses.
In March this year, TVB actually laid off 5% of its employees, and at the same time stopped broadcasting projects whose revenue did not meet expectations, a move that is expected to save 2The cost of 600 million.
In addition, they also merged their two channels, which can save 100 million production costs next year. I heard that it will stop using its store e-commerce**, which will also save tens of millions of costs.
TVB's revenue in the first half of 2023 is 15600 million, a loss of 40.7 billion. After significant cost savings, TVB is expected to significantly reduce losses next year, and even turn losses into profits.
Many people say that TVB should greatly expand the mainland market. Actually, this statement is indeed true. However, it is not easy to expand the mainland market, and the mainland market is also very volatile.
The traditional Davids, as well as the major Internet platforms, and now there are various teams that produce short dramas on various short platforms.
If you want to enter the mainland market, the key point for TVB is to find your own positioning. If you want to go big, TVB can't be compared with Mango TV at all, and there is even a huge gap with some Internet ** platforms in the mainland.
TVB's advantage in the past is the so-called Hong Kong flavor, or the acting skills and high-quality scripts of those old actors. However, TVB's income is too low, which leads to the loss of talents, and many actors are on their backs, and it is even difficult to go to the mainland to become netizens.
In addition, the withering of Hong Kong's young talent generation is also a key issue. Without talent, nothing can be done. Huawei's Yu Chengdong once said that with Huawei's team, even if there is no mobile phone to do it, it is the world's top socks to make socks.
To put it bluntly, talent is the key to everything. Without talents, it is difficult to support it with those old faces. As a matter of fact, TV stations in some small cities in the mainland can also live a very nourishing life, and they mainly operate a market with a population of one or two million. However, people have a unique market positioning, and they can also live well.
Perhaps the future of TVB is no longer to benchmark against giants like Mango Channel, but to learn from TV stations in some small cities in the mainland. The decline of TVB also reflects some problems in Hong Kong as a whole.
The policy advantages of the past are gone, and they are no longer a talent depression, so various advantages are slowly eroded.