Abstract: Geographical research of television is an important content of Media Geography, under the background of market reform, regional monopoly pattern in China’s urban TV market structure is facing reconstruction. Through literature review, it was found that few existing studies combine television and geographical research, less papers explore temporal and spatial characteristics of China's TV market structure in the process of marketization. Based on the review of marketization reform in TV media, this paper analyzed the spatial role of market reform and discussed the influence of geographical factors with the use of geographic information system (GIS) and SPSS Clementine. In so doing, we took 4 municipalities and 26 provincial cities as sample, summarized different types of TV market structures, used Spatial-temporal analysis as well as Standard Distance method to study its spatial distribution from 2005 to 2015, explored influencing factors by means of decision tree analysis and data mining. The results show that the spatial pattern evolution of China’s urban TV market structure is characterized by the stages of starting, promoting and deepening from 2005 to 2015. This process sees a remarkable change of spatial pattern. There are 4 major types of TV market structure in China, with the distribution of TV market structures shifting, spatial pattern transfers from North-South difference to East-West difference, and the East-West pattern is further refined in deepening period. When marketization starts, CCTV channel has strong control in north cities while local channel plays a key role in the south. As marketization promoting, cities in eastern and central are taken control by local channel while only cities in north-west under CCTV channel’s great influence. While in deepening period, TV markets in most eastern as well as central cities are of great competitive, only 9 of whose local channel keep dominant, and TV markets in western cities are controlled by external channels. Evidence also implies that the main reason affecting the spatial change of TV market structure varies and the influence of market forces takes shape. In starting period, when market force is too weak, cultural difference between north and south has major contribution to the pattern of TV market structure. Then in promoting period economic gap of eastern and western cities draws an unbalance development of TV media: the investment of cultural construction, the economic strength of television media and the level of social consumption lead to the spatial change. Finally, under the guidance of three network integration policy, Matthew effect of TV market gets aggravated in deepening period and further shapes the spatial pattern. What’s more, influenced by the development of new media and Internet, the scope of TV program dissemination is expanding, and the limit of transmission area is reducing. With the progress of science and internet technology, the number of competitive TV market structure city will continue to increase. In conclusion, the characteristic of spatial pattern of China’s urban TV market structure transforms from administrative monopoly to market-oriented, and the dominant factor of its spatial pattern translates from cultural factors to economic factors.

Key words: TV market structure, marketization, TV market share, spatial pattern, Media Geography