How Does Media Systems Shape The Development Of Media...

How does media system shape the development of media relevant company: a case study of WeChat’s practice in Chinese and oversea markets. Introduction The diversity of media systems around the world leads the media and communication industries in different countries and areas to different directions. As an overall background for every media and communication company in a certain area to innovate new products/services and develop, the media system plays an important role during a product/service’s lifecycle from its concept design to its growth and maturity. In this case, this essay will take a Chinese social network service (SNS) WeChat as example to analyze how does China’s protectionist model influence WeChat’s major features and†¦show more content†¦This SNS was first released in January 2011, offered services include free voice and video calls, multimedia messaging (allows video, image, text, and voice messages), group chat, and etc. (Tencent, 2016). As its Chinese name Weixin indicates, this service focuses on communicating through micro (Wei) messages (Xin). However, Weixin is not only a text and voice messaging communication service, it also introduces several social and media functions. Firstly, Weixin raises a personal photo stream service called ‘Moments’ for users to share their ‘best moments’ to people in their contact list (Tencent, 2016). Moments is a relatively private space only opens to users’ friends, and families. In the Chinese version, this space is directly called ‘the friend zone’. With the evolution of Weixin services, users can share multimedia contents from photos, to short videos, texts, website links and etc. in their Moments and comment or click ‘like’ under their friends’ Moments as well now. This virtual space allows users to know the daily life of people their cared without meeting in reality, and help them to maintain relationships by interacting in Moments. Secondly, Weixin allows any business, organization, and individual users to register official accounts with a few simple steps (Grata, 2014). Through an