China's most-watched Spring Festival TV gala will soon kick off

This year's Spring Festival TV gala, an annual celebratory show staged and televised by the China Media Group (CMG), will kick off at 8 p.m. on February 9 (Beijing Time).

The gala is a four-and-half-hour-long comprehensive TV art show consisting of singing and dancing, opera, sketch comedy, crosstalk, martial arts and acrobatics, lasting until the early morning of the New Year.

The show will air on CMG TV, radio channels and social media, as well as on more than 1,000 public screens in over 100 Chinese cities, and on more than 3,000 public screens in 70 cities across 34 other countries, according to a CMG press conference on Thursday.

The CMG has released an animated promo clip "Watching the Spring Festival Gala and Welcoming the Year of the Loong" for the 2024 Spring Festival Gala.

The gala has taken place every year since 1983, and for many Chinese people, it is an indispensable part of the celebrations to ring in the Chinese New Year with family members gathering around their TV sets with snacks, ready to catch every moment of the spectacular performances.

Discussing and debating the performances are popular pastimes for the Chinese people during the Lunar New Year. Many performances have left indelible memories for generations of the Chinese people, including punchlines in the sketch comedies that became public catchphrases overnight.

The gala in recent years has been utilizing cutting-edge technologies such as extended reality and immersive stage interaction technologies.

To satisfy the varied demands of different end-user devices, CMG production team member Jiang Wenbo said that this year's gala will be broadcast in ultra-high resolution and offer an immersive audiovisual feast for Chinese audiences at home and abroad.

The China Global Television Network has also partnered with more than 1,500 media outlets across 200 countries and regions to air and report on the gala via its English, Spanish, French, Arabic and Russian channels, as well as its social media platforms in 68 different languages.

The 2024 Spring Festival, or the Chinese New Year, will fall on February 10, kicking off the Year of the Loong.

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(With input from Xinhua)