About Luoyang Television

Luoyang Television

Luoyang Television is the television service of the Luoyang Radio and Television Station in Luoyang, Henan province — the city broadcaster of one of China's most historic cities, an ancient capital on the Yellow River plain in western Henan. It broadcasts Mandarin news, history, culture and local programming, including coverage of the Longmen Grottoes and the city's peony culture, for the Luoyang metropolitan area, distinct from the provincial Henan Television service in Zhengzhou. Luoyang Television is documented in the technical literature for an achievement unusual for a municipal station: the design and successful operation of a high-definition all-media studio, completed in 2016, from which it produces multiple live flagship programmes every day.

The all-media studio of 2016

To adapt to the requirements of media-convergence development, Luoyang Radio and Television Station built a high-definition all-media studio that was completed and put into operation in June 2016. A technical paper by the station's own television technology department, published in 2018, describes the system as positioned to be all-media, high-definition, multi-scene and multi-functional, with physical sets as its main feature, and used primarily for the live broadcasting and recording of news, special-topic and interview programmes. The paper sets out the design and implementation of the studio across its stage art system, media systems and associated production technology. For a prefecture-level city station, the project was ambitious: rather than a conventional single-purpose news studio, Luoyang built a flexible converged production space intended to serve television, and the station's wider all-media output, from one technical core.

Three live flagships a day

The workload placed on the studio shows how intensively it is used. The technical account records that the studio produces three flagship live programmes daily: Luoyang News, the station's principal bulletin; Live Luoyang, a live livelihood and city-affairs programme; and Hotline for Work Style, a public-supervision format of the kind Chinese municipal stations use to put citizens' complaints about services and official work style to the responsible departments on air. In addition, the studio records numerous further programmes, including Midday Report, the County Edition of News — serving the counties under Luoyang's administration — News Focus and Journey Through Heluo, a title invoking the Heluo culture of the Yellow River and Luo River confluence region of which Luoyang is the historic centre. The paper describes the resulting workload as extremely heavy.

A thousand live broadcasts without a failure

The operational record reported for the studio's first period of service is the paper's central claim: after more than a year of operation, the all-media studio had broadcast live over 1,000 times without ever affecting normal programme broadcasting. The authors conclude that the studio met the requirements of high-frequency live broadcasting, leveraged Luoyang's regional news advantages, broke through the inherent bottlenecks of municipal stations and achieved satisfactory results in all-media convergence. That judgment — that the project broke through the bottlenecks typical of city-level stations — captures the significance of the investment: live production at this frequency was historically the preserve of provincial and national broadcasters, and Luoyang's studio was designed to bring a municipal newsroom to the same operational tempo.

News for a city of counties

The programme structure of Luoyang Television reflects the administrative shape of the city it serves. Luoyang administers a large territory of districts and rural counties in western Henan, and the station's output is built to reach all of it: the main Luoyang News for the city as a whole, the County Edition of News for county affairs, and live livelihood programming through which residents raise the everyday issues — utilities, roads, markets, services — that municipal television exists to air. The station's converged-media news centre, whose editorial department staff appear in national broadcasting-industry coverage of the eightieth anniversary of Chinese people's broadcasting in 2020, organises this output across television and new media, in line with the all-media strategy the 2016 studio was built to support.

Television in an ancient capital

Luoyang's claim on Chinese history is exceptional, and it shapes the cultural remit of its broadcaster. The city was the capital of nine dynasties in the account used by national feature coverage, and it was once the eastern starting point of the Silk Road. Its Longmen Grottoes, with the great Fengxian Temple sculptures, are among the masterpieces of Chinese Buddhist art, and the city is nationally associated with the peony, celebrated each spring in a festival that dominates local schedules. A programme such as Journey Through Heluo belongs squarely in this territory: Heluo, the region of the Yellow and Luo rivers around Luoyang, is regarded in Chinese tradition as a cradle of Chinese civilisation. Luoyang Television's history and culture programming — and its coverage of peony season and the Longmen heritage landscape — performs for its own city the same function that Henan's provincial broadcaster performed nationally with its celebrated festival programming: it turns deep local history into living television.

Distinction from Henan Television

Luoyang Television is distinct from Henan Television, the provincial broadcaster based in Zhengzhou, even though both are watched in Luoyang and both draw on Henan's history. The provincial service addresses the whole of Henan and competes nationally by satellite; the Luoyang station addresses one city and its counties, with the granularity of county news editions and a daily work-style hotline that no provincial channel could sustain. The relationship is the standard tiered structure of Chinese broadcasting — national, provincial, municipal — but in Luoyang the municipal tier carries unusual weight, because the city's identity is so much older and more distinct than the province's modern administrative frame.

Programmes of record

The programme titles recorded for the Luoyang all-media studio amount to a portrait of a municipal station's whole remit. News is present at three levels — the main Luoyang News, the Midday Report and the County Edition of News — so that the city, its day and its counties each receive a dedicated bulletin. Accountability is present in Hotline for Work Style, where the conduct of public services is examined live. Analysis is present in News Focus. Place and identity are present in Live Luoyang and in Journey Through Heluo, the cultural strand named for the river country around the city. Interview and special-topic programmes, recorded in the same studio, complete the slate. That all of these are produced from one converged studio, with physical sets reconfigured between them, is the practical meaning of the station's all-media design: a small municipal team sustaining the programme range of a much larger broadcaster.

Convergence and the municipal model

The Luoyang experience has been presented by its own engineers as a model of how a municipal station can converge. The all-media studio was explicitly designed to serve live television, recorded programming and new-media production from shared physical and technical resources, and its reported record — three live flagships a day, a slate of recorded programmes, more than a thousand live broadcasts in little over a year without disrupting normal output — is the evidence offered for that model. In an era when Chinese city broadcasters face shrinking traditional audiences, Luoyang Radio and Television Station's answer was to industrialise live local production: to make the city itself, its government, its counties and its heritage the continuous subject of a modern, high-definition, always-live television service.