About Hunan TV

Hunan TV

Hunan TV — Hunan Satellite Television, Hunan Weishi — is a provincial satellite television channel based in Changsha, Hunan, owned by Hunan Broadcasting System. First aired locally on 29 September 1970, it expanded to nationwide satellite television on 1 January 1997 and became, in the assessment repeated across reference sources, China's second-most-watched television channel, behind only CCTV-1 — a position it has held while occasionally overtaking CCTV-1 in ratings. Nicknamed the Mango Channel from its logo, it is the entertainment superpower of Chinese provincial television.

Hunan TV's importance is out of proportion to its provincial licence. Its variety formats — Happy Camp, Super Girl, Day Day Up, I Am a Singer — repeatedly set the national agenda for entertainment television, and its streaming sibling took the name Mango TV from the channel's own nickname.

Ownership: Hunan Broadcasting System

Hunan TV is owned by Hunan Broadcasting System (HBS), the provincial broadcaster of Hunan province, based in Changsha. HBS operates the satellite channel alongside a family of terrestrial channels and the Mango TV streaming platform, whose name derives from the satellite channel's mango-shaped logo and 'Mango Channel' nickname. The channel broadcasts in Mandarin and in high definition — HD broadcasting began on 28 September 2009.

As a provincial satellite station, Hunan TV is owned within the provincial state media system, but its operating culture became famous for commercial aggression: it competed for the national entertainment audience as if it were a national network, and by audience measures it became one.

From provincial station to satellite challenger

Hunan Television first aired on 29 September 1970 as a provincial station with a single service. Its transformation began with satellite: on 1 January 1997 Hunan TV began nationwide satellite broadcasting, joining the first generation of provincial channels that could suddenly address all of China rather than one province. Channel histories date the modern Hunan TV from that launch — the moment a Changsha station could compete with Beijing.

The entertainment strategy followed immediately. Happy Camp launched in July 1997, months after the satellite debut, and the channel built its identity around youth, music and variety under a slogan rendered in English as 'Happy China'. By the mid-2000s its coverage reached some 60 percent of China's population — around 760 million people — and its ratings made it the standing challenger to the national broadcaster.

Happy Camp: twenty-four years of Saturday nights

Happy Camp (Kuaile Dabenying) was Hunan TV's flagship variety show, produced by Hunan Broadcasting System. It debuted in July 1997 — reference dates give 7 or 11 July 1997 — and aired every Saturday night until it went off air on 25 September 2021, after more than 1,000 episodes across 24 seasons. From 2006 until its conclusion it was hosted by He Jiong, Li Weijia, Xie Na, Du Haitao and Wu Xin, collectively the Happy Family, who also recorded music and films as a group.

The format — celebrity guests, games, performances, interviews and parodies — made it one of China's most popular programmes, with a minimum active viewership of ten million and record ratings for star appearances. It won the Asian Television Award for best entertainment programme and was repeatedly ranked among China's most valuable and most-searched variety shows. For a generation, Saturday night in China meant Happy Camp; its ending in 2021 closed the longest-running chapter of the satellite entertainment era.

Super Girl and the talent-show earthquake

If Happy Camp built the channel, Super Girl made it a phenomenon. The singing contest, modelled on the Pop Idol format family, swept China in 2004 and 2005: the 2005 final drew a total of 400 million viewers, and DutchCulture's mapping of Chinese media records that Hunan Satellite TV thereby temporarily overtook CCTV as the most watched and most profitable television station in the country. Winners became instant national stars, and the show's voting mechanics made it a cultural and political talking point far beyond entertainment.

Super Boy followed for male singers, and the franchise established the template — mass auditions, public voting, manufactured intimacy with contestants — that defined Chinese reality television for a decade and provoked regulators to rein the genre in. Hunan TV's talent machinery also produced the channel's later music formats, including I Am a Singer, in which established professionals competed.

Day Day Up and the second flagship

Day Day Up (Tiantian Xiangshang) was Hunan TV's second flagship, a talk and variety show aired from 4 August 2008 to 2022. Throughout its run it was, with Happy Camp, one of Hunan Television's two flagship programmes and one of the most popular television shows in China. Its name, taken from a Chinese idiom associated with Mao Zedong — 'study hard and make progress every day' — announced its difference from its Saturday sibling: a weekday-minded blend of talk, culture, food and gentle education, created by the team behind the earlier Hunan hit 'More Talk More Happiness'.

Hosted in its classic years by Wang Han and the 'Day Day Brothers', the show demonstrated the channel's range: the same station that produced the loudest talent contests could also hold an audience with conversation about traditional crafts, regional food and social manners.

Reality, drama and the wider slate

Hunan TV's documented notable programmes map the modern Chinese reality catalogue: 'Where Are We Going, Dad?', the celebrity-parenting reality format; 'Chinese Restaurant', in which stars run a restaurant abroad; 'Back to Field', the rural-life slow variety show; 'Takes a Real Man'; '72 Floors of Mystery'; 'Come Sing with Me' and 'Super-Vocal'. The channel's drama programming was equally era-defining — the costume phenomenon 'Princess Returning Pearl' (Huan Zhu Ge Ge), whose first two seasons in 1998 and 1999 took audience shares reported up to 58 and 65 percent, remains the benchmark of the satellite drama age.

The slate's commercial discipline was visible in scheduling: in 2015, following changes in regulator policy, Hunan TV changed prime-time drama broadcasts to two episodes per night instead of three and moved the prime-time start from 19:30 to 20:00 — adapting its most valuable hour to the new rules without losing its audience.

International reach and collaborations

Hunan TV has worked internationally from early in its satellite era. On 15 December 2006 it collaborated with the BBC to broadcast 'Just the Two of Us' — described as the first entertainment collaboration between Chinese television and the BBC on a global scale. On 20 May 2009, Hunan TV World launched in Hong Kong, extending the channel's brand beyond the mainland.

The channel's formats and stars travel across Asia, and its signal covers most of China including Hong Kong and Macau. Its influence travels further than its signal: the talent-show and reality grammar it popularised was copied by every competing satellite channel, making Hunan TV the style-setter of an industry.

Audiences, ratings and the Mango brand

By 2013, Hunan TV had broadcast to over one billion viewers in China, with 358 million showing approval for its programming and approximately 210 million daily viewers; online, its platform had accumulated 730 million views. It is described across sources as China's second-most-watched channel after CCTV-1, occasionally overtaking it — the only provincial channel of which that is said.

The brand outgrew the channel. The mango logo gave the station its nickname, the nickname gave the streaming service its name — Mango TV is now one of China's major video platforms — and the channel's slogan and yellow identity are recognised nationwide. In 2017 the channel was also publicly criticised in a provincial inspection notice for lacking political responsibility and focusing excessively on ratings — the shadow side of the entertainment-first strategy that made it famous.

Digital presence and the official website

Hunan TV's official website is hunantv.com, the home of the channel and the Mango TV platform, carrying live and on-demand viewing of the channel's variety and drama slate. The migration of the channel's audience to Mango TV's apps is the channel's second life: its classic variety archive and its new reality seasons alike are consumed increasingly on demand.

That digital strength is the channel's hedge against the decline of scheduled entertainment television — the brand, the formats and the star system all transfer to streaming, where 'Mango' remains one of the strongest names in Chinese video.

Why Hunan TV matters

Hunan TV matters because it proved a provincial channel could beat the national broadcaster at entertainment — and in doing so, it set the terms of Chinese popular television for twenty-five years. Satellite in 1997, Happy Camp the same year, Super Girl's 400-million-viewer final in 2005, Day Day Up, I Am a Singer and the reality slate after: the channel's history is a syllabus of the formats China watched. Second in ratings only to CCTV-1 and first in influence among its peers, the Mango Channel is the capital of Chinese entertainment television — and it is in Changsha, not Beijing.