China Gets to Meet ‘Friends’

Move over Ross and Rachel, here come Tang Jinsong and Su Feifei.

News Corp. is hoping a Mandarin version of the hit U.S. sitcom “Friends” will win it fans when it launches a long-coveted local-language channel in China in the next few weeks.

Called “Joyful Youth,” the newly filmed program will be among a host of locally produced talk shows, dramas and game shows that News Corp.’s Hong Kong-based unit Star Group will offer 1 million cable TV viewers in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong.

The new channel--called Xingkong Weishi, or Star Satellite TV--marks News Corp. chief Rupert Murdoch’s biggest victory to date in his long and sometimes tumultuous courtship of China and its massive but tightly restricted media market.

Late last year, China gave permission to Xingkong, Hong Kong-based Phoenix Satellite TV and AOL Time Warner’s China Entertainment TV (CETV) permission for cable distribution in Guangdong. Phoenix is 38% owned by News Corp.

That marked the first time foreign channels were given legal access to ordinary Chinese homes. News Corp. and other foreign broadcasters have been restricted for decades to hotels rated three stars or more and residence compounds approved for foreigners.

“The new channel is the most important initiative we have going on at this time” in China, said News Corp. broadcasting executive Jamie Davis, who is heading the channel.

Now comes the hard part. Building on lessons Star learned in India, Davis is banking on local language programming to win viewers for what it hopes will in the long term become a national channel reaching China’s 100 million homes with cable TV. Never mind that Star’s new channel will carry Mandarin language programming in a mostly Cantonese-speaking province.

“In order to really capture the hearts of the audience here, you must be local. And that means to speak the local language,” said Davis, a 35-year-old Chicago native.

Xingkong Weishi will be limited at first to airing in the Pearl River Delta region under the terms of its agreement with China, which also call for News Corp. to make an English channel of state broadcaster China Central Television (CCTV) available in Los Angeles and San Francisco.

But News Corp. and AOL hope their landing rights will be expanded beyond Guangdong.

The foreign firms hope last year’s agreement giving them access in Guangdong was a signal that Beijing is willing to relax its grip on China’s airwaves.