Here are some Chinese websites you can turn to when you crave for an U.S. TV Series.
1. Sohu
China’s 8th biggest site, and the world’s 32nd, Sohu pulled in $455m in revenue for Q1 2015, $239m from advertising revenues, for 20% YOY growth.
Besides its Chinese streaming entertainment, Sohu offers a full panoply of the latest American entertainment, e.g. Mad Men, whose finale has been viewed on that site alone almost 35 million times as this is written.
2. Youku
Youku earned almost $150 million in advertising for Q1 2015, representing a 43% jump YOY. The company produces its own content, as well as offering thousands of hours of western entertainment, such as 2 Broke Girls.
The 94 million eyes that have seen the episode above were first treated to spots from the likes of Chevy, Biotherm, and Lancome, the latter sticking to blue-eyed Caucasian models.
3. iQiyi
Baidu launched iQiyi in 2010, leveraging big bucks and its search stranglehold to quickly become China’s largest video site, with more than 200 million daily viewers on mobile who watch over 4 hours of content a month.
Let’s look at movies for this example, in this case Fast & Furious, seen on iQiyi 6.5 million times. Considering that Fast & Furious is iconic in China, and that iQiyi is the country’s highest trafficked video site, the fact that it has so many fewer views than popular TV shows indicates that movie formats may be less popular for streaming video content than the former.
Whatever the individual numbers, iQiyi and most other video platforms have encyclopedic, if not imdb level, cross-linked multi-media information on actors, directors, similar movies, and the like, as shown above. Those who don’t want to go deep can just switch over to a recent episode of WWE Raw.
4. LeTv
Lenovo-owned LeTV has a market cap of $12 billion, and is the media tie-in for its parent company’s big move on smartphones, smart TVs, on into the ballyhooed Internet of Things. Their American TV home page is a what’s what of current cutting edge boob-tubery.
LeTV produces a lot of original content, but has yet to offer a hit approaching The Flash, whose first season has been viewed an incredible 671 million times on the platform:
The Flash is free, for those willing to watch a minute of spots from western brands such as Nutrilon, featuring western babies for the global quality win.
5. v.QQ
Don’t think for a minute Tencent is ceding any entertainment market share without a fight. China’s most profitable tech company brings the free vid on its platform v.QQ , where those who sit through ads for Skoda, Ctrip, Adidas, and Mobil motor oil can watch season 3 of Game of Thrones, gratis:
You don’t have to watch the ads. Most platforms offer ad-free viewing for nominal monthly fees ranging 5-10 RMB. Few viewers pay for such. After all, there are plenty of P2P download sites on the Chinese net where TV and movies are downloaded for free, not that we’d want to encourage such reprehensible behavior by linking them.
As for Chinese online viewers paying a $7.99 monthly fee to watch licensed content, the burden of evidence is on Netflix, to prove Chinese viewers will buck the trend of free online streaming with ads.
Source: Chinadigitalreview
