About Btime

Btime

Btime, also known as Beijing Time, is a Beijing digital news and video platform published at btime.com. Launched in April 2016 by Beijing Media Network — the media operation of Beijing Radio and Television Station — together with the technology company Qihoo 360, it was created as the broadcaster's flagship convergent-media product: a mobile-first outlet combining a television and radio broadcaster's news gathering with an internet company's distribution technology. It built a large short-video news operation and serves as the online home of Beijing Radio and Television Station's journalism, documentaries and live events.

Origins: a broadcaster and a technology company

Btime's founding partnership is the key to its identity. Beijing Media Network belongs to Beijing Radio and Television Station, the municipal broadcaster of China's capital, whose television channels, radio services and newsrooms generate a large volume of Beijing-focused journalism every day. Qihoo 360, its partner in the launch, is a Beijing internet company founded in June 2005, headquartered in the capital's Chaoyang District and known nationally for its internet security products, its 360 browsers and its mobile app store. Chinese launch coverage in 2016 described Beijing Time as a joint creation of the broadcaster and the technology company. The logic of the pairing was explicit in the venture's design: the broadcaster contributed professional news gathering, video production and the authority of a mainstream municipal media institution, while 360 contributed product design, recommendation and distribution technology of the kind that decides what mobile users actually see.

Launch in April 2016

Beijing Time launched in April 2016, at the moment when Chinese media consumption was shifting decisively to smartphones and when short video was emerging as a primary news format. The platform was mobile-first from the start, organised around an app and a mobile-friendly website rather than around a traditional desktop portal. Its name carries its positioning: "Beijing Time" is both the standard time of China and a claim to be the capital's own time-stamped window on the news — a Beijing outlet, published from Beijing, for an audience following the capital and the country. The operator behind the platform is Beijing Time Co., Ltd, which appears as the media contact company for Beijing Radio and Television Station's Beijing Time productions.

What Btime publishes

Btime publishes news in text, live and — above all — video formats. Its output covers Beijing municipal news, national news, society, culture, tourism and public-service information, drawing on the reporting resources of Beijing Radio and Television Station. Short video is the platform's signature form: the broadcaster's television journalism is cut, captioned and distributed for mobile feeds, and original short-video reporting is produced for the platform itself. The site's item pages, published under item.btime.com, are the standard link format through which its video and illustrated stories circulate on other platforms. Beijing Time content is also distributed widely beyond its own app: its productions are carried, as its event announcements list, across platforms including Baidu, Sina Weibo, Sina News, iQiyi, Kuaishou, Douyu, Bilibili, Douyin (TikTok in China) and Youku, as well as WeChat video channels.

Documentaries and special productions

Beijing Time is not only a breaking-news feed; it is also a production and distribution label for the broadcaster's longer work. A representative example is "Where the Spring Breeze Blows," a 14-episode multi-platform documentary launched by Beijing Radio and Television Station to showcase a new Beijing in the new era. Each episode, approximately 12 minutes long, aired on BTV and on the btime.com app, running Monday to Friday in an early-evening slot. Its 14 themes spanned urban planning, the capital's history, international exchanges, the "Double Olympic City," sustainable development, regional collaboration, intelligent industry and innovation, Beijing as a science and technology innovation centre, cultural heritage, green initiatives, governance, urban-rural integration and related subjects. The production was characterised by a people's perspective and lively expression, telling the city's story through "extraordinary ordinary people" — a style consistent with the platform's short-form, human-scale approach to Beijing stories.

Live events and cultural programming

The platform also carries Beijing's cultural life to online audiences. Beijing Radio and Television Station Beijing Time implemented the online programme for the 2nd Beijing International Canal Art Week, an event sponsored by the Beijing Municipal Culture and Tourism Bureau and organised by the Beijing Overseas Cultural Exchanges Center to deepen cultural and tourism exchanges among international canal cities. Its live programme, "Destination with Online Popularity in the 'Circle of Friends' for Worldwide Canals," invited seven canal cultural envoys from countries including China, Egypt, Thailand, Mexico, the Netherlands, Italy and Germany to travel by boat on the Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal. The broadcasts ran on consecutive evenings in December 2022 through the Beijing Time official website at btime.com and a long list of partner platforms, with short-video collections released the following mornings, and overseas audiences reached through the Beijing Time official YouTube channel and Radio Beijing International. The pattern — a live event produced for television, executed online by Beijing Time and clipped into short video — is the platform's working model in miniature.

Place within Beijing Radio and Television Station

Within its parent organisation, Btime functions as the digital front door of Beijing Radio and Television Station. The station's television output airs on BTV channels and simultaneously on the btime.com app; its international radio identity, Radio Beijing International, shares overseas distribution with Beijing Time's YouTube presence. For the broadcaster, the platform solves the central problem facing Chinese municipal television in the mobile era: its audiences increasingly watch on phones, through aggregators and social platforms, rather than on a television set at a scheduled hour. By operating its own app and site while also syndicating aggressively to the major Chinese video and news platforms, Beijing Time keeps the station's journalism in those feeds under its own brand.

Beijing focus, national reach

Btime's editorial centre of gravity is Beijing itself: municipal government and services, traffic and weather, neighbourhood stories, culture and tourism, and the major national events that take place in the capital. That local depth is the inheritance of a municipal broadcaster whose reporters cover the city daily. At the same time, its distribution through national platforms gives its stories reach far beyond the capital, and its cultural programming — such as the Grand Canal art week, which connected Beijing to canal cities worldwide — is explicitly aimed at presenting Beijing to China and to international audiences. The platform's overseas channels, including its official YouTube channel, extend that presentation abroad in a way a municipal television station could not have achieved through broadcasting alone.

The short-video news model

Btime is frequently understood as an example of the convergent-media model that Chinese mainstream broadcasters adopted in the mid-2010s: keep professional, licensed news gathering inside the broadcaster, but rebuild production and distribution around mobile video. The venture's construction — a broadcaster's newsroom joined to a major internet company's technology at launch — embodied that model institutionally rather than merely editorially. Its subsequent output shows the model in practice: television documentaries reformatted as app series of roughly 12-minute episodes, live cultural events streamed and then recut as next-morning short-video collections, and daily news produced for feeds as much as for bulletins. The large short-video news operation it built is the core of its identity as an online news outlet.

Continuing role

Btime continues to operate at btime.com as Beijing Radio and Television Station's digital news and video platform, published from Beijing by Beijing Time Co., Ltd. It remains the app and website on which the station's documentaries premiere alongside their television broadcasts, the implementer of the station's online live events, and the brand under which the broadcaster's news circulates across China's major video and social platforms. Launched in April 2016 from the partnership of Beijing Media Network and Qihoo 360, it stands as the capital broadcaster's answer to the mobile age — a Beijing newsroom's reporting, rebuilt for the phone screen and the short-video feed.