Kuaishou Wins Exclusive Partnership With 2020 Spring Festival Gala

Chinese short video platform Kuaishou has established an exclusive interactive partnership with CCTV’s annual New Year’s Gala, also known as the Spring Festival Gala in 2020, according to Chinese media LatePost.

By landing the partnership with CCTV, Kuaishou will not only have the exclusive managing rights to the commercials and promotional ads leading up to the gala, the livestreaming of the event and other interactive promos, but it will also send out red packets to Chinese citizens throughout the festival.

Kuaishou won the partnership with CCTV in a bid against other influential tech giants such as Alibaba, ByteDance and Pinduoduo.

This is the biggest account Kuaishou has acquired throughout the year and the company is already deep into closed discussions on the project.

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Kuaishou’s budget for the 2020 Spring Festival Gala will be higher than Baidu, but not the 4 billion yuan previously reported by Chinese media, according to insiders familiar with the matter.

The annual Chinese New Year special is broadcast annually on the eve of Chinese New Year and both domestically and internationally. It has the largest audience of any entertainment show in the world, and is recognized by Guinness World Records as the world’s most watched television program.

During the Spring Festival Gala of 2019, Kuaishou was only the exclusive short video partner of the event, while the major interactive partnership with the show went to Chinese internet giant Baidu.

Kuaishou is rumored to be leveraging next-gen technologies such as AI and AR to provide a more immersive and interactive experience for users on its platform. The short video platform boasts a wide range of original content presented to the user to make them feel more emotionally connected, the article added.

So far, Kuaishou has accumulated more than 200 million daily active users and over 400 million monthly active users, with more than 200 million content creators recording and sharing their videos on the platform last year, according to Ma Hongbin, senior vice-president of Kuaishou.

The platform’s daily active users in China’s first and second-tier cities have surpassed 60 million.