China Media Group
- Chinese name
- 中央广播电视总台
- Unified Social Credit Code
12100000MB1B48495F
China Media Group (中央广播电视总台) is China’s state-owned national broadcaster created in 2018 through the consolidation of China Central Television, China National Radio, and China Radio International, and it operates as a central actor in China’s broadcast and streaming ecosystem across television, radio, and digital platforms while also serving major national and live-event production needs. In the context of digital humans, China Media Group has positioned AI-generated presenters and virtual hosts as practical production infrastructure for news and event coverage, entertainment programming, and multi-platform distribution, using digital-human pipelines to standardize on-air delivery, accelerate turnaround for clips and short-form formats, support multi-language or cross-regional presentation, and integrate real-time graphics and interactive elements for large live broadcasts. Its deployments typically treat digital humans as brand-consistent on-screen interfaces that can be scheduled, localized, and reused across programs, and they sit alongside broader AI production systems for script assistance, voice synthesis, post-production, and multi-screen packaging, which together reflect a strategy of combining broadcast authority with scalable, software-defined “virtual talent” for contemporary media workflows.
China Media Group and China Central Television are not separate peer broadcasters; CCTV is the television component and flagship brand inside CMG’s consolidated structure. CMG (中央广播电视总台), also translated as the Central Radio and Television General Station and often branded as “Voice of China,” was created in 2018 as part of China’s Party-and-state institutional reforms by merging the legacy national broadcasters China National Radio, China Radio International, and CCTV into a single umbrella organization, with CCTV continuing to operate as CMG’s core domestic TV network while CMG provides the unified leadership, budgeting, and cross-platform strategy that spans television, radio, and international services such as China Global Television Network. In practice, the relationship is best understood as “CMG is the parent group; CCTV is its television division/brand,” which is why CCTV channels and the CCTV.com web properties remain prominent public-facing outlets even though their institutional ownership and governance sit within the broader CMG framework established by the 2018 consolidation.
Its flagship named deployment is the AI sign-language anchor — the broadcaster’s first, unveiled by CCTV News with Baidu Cloud in November 2021 and on duty since the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics, translating broadcasts for China’s tens of millions of hearing-impaired viewers year-round, with her own Baidu Baike entry. Cultural programming has used a virtual depiction of the Tang literary figure Han Yu (韩愈) for audience interaction, CMG served as the deployment context for the Digital Qian Xuesen (数字钱学森) historical figure, and it prepared the First AI Singer Competition.
CCTV has played a prominent role in showcasing and adopting digital humans across its programming, using AI-generated avatars in news broadcasts, special events, and public information campaigns. These digital figures serve as virtual anchors, sign language interpreters, brand representatives, and even recreations of historical personalities. CCTV has collaborated with major tech companies to implement technologies such as real-time motion capture, facial cloning, large language models, and speech synthesis. The network emphasizes the growing role of digital humans in media, governance, education, and commerce, while also addressing concerns about ethical standards, realism, legal frameworks, and professional development. Through frequent coverage and deployment, CCTV positions digital humans as a core element in China’s digital transformation strategy.
“CCTV Listen Media Model 2.0” (央视听媒体大模型2.0) is described as a self-developed large-model system from China Media Group positioned as an AI toolchain for end-to-end audiovisual production in which digital humans are treated as a core output format rather than an add-on: news reports note it was first applied to CCTV Spring Festival Gala content creation, where it is used for generating image/video materials and producing “hyper-realistic” digital humans to improve production quality and efficiency, and it is also presented as a production enabler in major-event live broadcasting, including 15th National Games of China coverage where the model supports functions such as “video intelligent creation,” automatic highlight clipping, intelligent planning, and Chinese–English–Cantonese intelligent translation, alongside “light-field scanning” hyper-realistic digital humans and “lossless” digital-human modeling used to build immersive interview scenes with mixed virtual/real presentation; the same news reports link the product to CMG’s broader “5G + 4K/8K + AI” workflow framing and to a 2025 white-paper discussion that associates the model with lightweight 3D modeling and virtual production pipelines (e.g., LED virtual production and XR interactive applications), and one listed item further characterizes the 2.0 version as having completed a 4K hyper-realistic digital-human upgrade in February 2025 with multilingual simultaneous broadcast capability that was applied in “Two Sessions” reporting via a virtual anchor workflow.