Q&A: ATV's China president, Teddy Pu

How does ATV deal with the current multi-screen viewing habits that are affecting ratings?

Television is just another channel for content, much like another retail store for a product. So competition is in the content, not in the type of channel. Thus, competing on screens has no meaning.

Whoever is the content producer is the king, and has the rights to determine the direction of the industry, including those of viewers and advertisers. Furthermore, advertisers will follow the viewers to where they are, to simplify things for them.

Yes, the most popular websites now are online video sites; so popular that I predict the likes of Sohu Video will become independent from its parent company. We recognise that it cannot be avoided. We don't bypass them but see a need to integrate traditional television with digital trends.

What is your view on original content put out by online video rivals?

Many online video sites are producing their own content, as with Youku and Tudou. Still, their content standards cannot match those of traditional television stations as the prowess of tradtiional television lies in its resources.

The vast majority of video sites do not possess neither news production rights nor capabilities for instance, but merely the rights to forward and repurpose content.

Therefore, in many ways you cannot improve on content by just buying dramas from overseas producers or just poaching professional talent with television backgrounds.

'Co-opetition': this is a business strategy derived from a combination of cooperation and competition. One of the common practices you may not know is even when an online video site has bought and secured exclusive rights to a foreign drama series, it will "sub-contract" those rights to other video sites to recoup some of the costs. This is much like the deals between American film studios and Chinese video websites to allow broadcast of dramas on the web one month after airing in the US.

What ATV is trying to do, for example, for our annual Miss ATV Miss Asia beauty pageant, is to collaborate with such as Youku, Tencent, Sina. Regional finals of the pageant with contestants representing different geographical areas are aired exclusively on ATV's channel for Hong Kong, and on those sites for the mainland Chinese.

A TV station is like a factory with production machines, anchors, actors, schedulers, and cameramen. Now we are building our own website as an additional online viewing channel apart from our free-to-air channel.

How about attracting and retaining advertisers?

As for advertising, online video sites typically use pre-roll ads. Some of these pre-rolls have promotional content affiliated with the show in question, but most of them do not.

Advertising on TV is still considered more credible, especially during news programmes where dependability is higher due to the halo effect. It will do advertisers good to place branding TVCs around such programmes especially during primetime, and tactical ones online.

For example, a McDonald's ad placed at 8am for breakfast sales online is much more effective than on TV.