China Media Group's (CMG) 2023 Spring Festival Gala began at 8 p.m. on January 21 in a thick atmosphere of joy, auspiciousness and jubilation.

The gala presented a unique and warm cultural feast to Chinese people worldwide and sent good wishes of the auspicious rabbit.

According to preliminary statistics, as of midnight, the average viewership on live television reached 20.23 percent of the total audience share.

The number of users of the online live broadcast hit 655 million, an increase of 47.7 percent compared with last year. The total number of viewers of the vertical screen broadcast reached 179 million, an increase of more than 50 percent year on year. 

China Global Television Network (CGTN) published more than 500 reports related to the Spring Festival Gala in English, Spanish, French, Arab and Russian, with more than 222 million global views, and 36.01 million video views. The number of live views on CMG's overseas social platforms exceeded 41.18 million.

CMG broadcast or published reports on the Spring Festival Gala to global audiences in 68 languages. More than 1,000 media outlets from more than 170 countries and regions including the United States, Canada, France, Italy, Russia, Japan, Brazil, Australia, India, the United Arab Emirates, Singapore and South Africa simultaneously broadcast and reported on the Spring Festival Gala.

The Japanese video platform Niconico rebroadcast CMG's Spring Festival Gala for the eighth year in a row. The total number of viewers reached 124,000, and the program's favorable rate reached 93 percent. 

Spring Festival Gala promotional videos were played on more than 1,600 outdoor large screens and theater screens around the world, and lit up many well-known landmarks including the World Trade Center and Empire State Building in the United States, the Colosseum in Italy, and the tallest building in the world, Burj Khalifa in Dubai.

Technology and culture in performances

The 2023 Spring Festival Gala, from program forms to the mascot, main logo, stage design and actor costumes, all featured ingenious use of cultural elements.

Interweaving technology and cultural integration created an audio-visual cultural feast, which reflected the achievements of creative transformation and innovative development of traditional Chinese culture.

Popular singers from all over the country and all walks of life also took their place on the gala stage to sing new songs that focused on ordinary lives.

2023 marks the 10th anniversary of the Belt and Road initiative. On the stage of the Spring Festival Gala, artists from countries along the Belt and Road and Chinese musicians gathered online and jointly presented a song.

To meet the audience's diverse viewing needs and help create the warm and festive atmosphere of the Spring Festival Gala anytime and anywhere, CMG also adopted the dual platform of "Hundred cities and thousand screens + cloud listening" to live broadcast the gala simultaneously. The audience could enjoy the immersive audiovisual effect of about 500 8K ultra-high-definition large public screens in the cultural squares across China.