Spring Festival Gala sets record for most online views of a live stream in China ever

Although it has only been around for a few decades, CCTV’s Spring Festival Gala has become as big a part of the holiday as dumplings or firecrackers for many people in China. In this age of television increasingly moving online, the gala’s move to the web was inevitable, and this year Baidu’s iQiyi video platform live-streamed the entire show.

While it may not come close to matching the TV viewership, iQiyi’s live stream still broke records, capturing more than 14 million simultaneous viewers and smashing the previous simultaneous viewer record set during the World Cup. The company also says that in total, the Gala had been streamed more than 70 million times as of Thursday, and attracted more than 100 million comments. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the vast majority of those watching online – 91 percent – were under age 30.

But interpreting iQiyi’s numbers as a wholesale shift away from the television as a platform for watching the Gala – China’s most popular televised event by far – is probably oversimplifying the matter. There are millions of Chinese people studying and working abroad who previously had to miss out on the Gala, unless their local cable company carried CCTV. This year, thanks to iQiyi’s stream, more of the global Chinese diaspora was able to tune in and take part.