Government regulation on the flourishing network audio-visual entrepreneurship: experience from the administration in Beijing

The network audio-visual entrepreneurship in China has achieved great progress and engendered conspicuous negative externalities in the early development stage. Few studies have investigated how media entrepreneurship coordinates with government regulation and the influence of government regulation on media entrepreneurship. This study aims at investigating government regulation on the flourishing network audio-visual entrepreneurship. This study performs semi-structured interviews with 14 respondents who are experienced in government regulation of the network audio-visual sector. It is found that license management and content censorship are principal approaches to regulating entrepreneurship. The media companies have been constrained by limited government support and social resources, and therefore endeavored to legitimate their business by collaborating with Internet conglomerates. Strict rules of content censorship discourage users from producing audio-visual content, and impose restrictions on Internet companies and other producers producing and displaying audio-visual content.