Via China Net Investor, this interview of the founders of Shanghai-based dot.com Tudou.com, Gary Wang and Marc van der Chijs, serves up one very juicy tidbit of information — that Tudou.com is already streaming more minutes of video content every month than YouTube (15 billion minutes per month versus 3.5 billion)! Then in a self-deprecatory turn, Wang turns around to say that those numbers are never really accurate.
Those numbers should really be cause for celebration but there is a reason why Tudou isn’t going around everywhere trumpeting those figures to investors just yet. The interviewer Vincent Everts presses on and asks if those numbers aren’t possible just because they are really operating within a “copyright paradise” — an assertion that Wang quickly denies.
Well not too long ago, Virtual China uncovered a UK-based site called TV Links which works as a linkfinder for streaming movies, TV shows, anime, cartoons, and documentaries on the Internet:
While some of the links are to sites like Veoh, Stage 6 (especially for material before 1990) and occasionally Google Video, for its current movies TV Links takes advantage of widespread free English-language content hosted on Chinese sites like Tudou, Youku, 56.com, and Ouou. No need to visit these sites directly and do a search; TV Links has about 2000 movies all there for you. And TVL has a big group of volunteers who scour the web for additional links. Eventually this model might also work for MP3s, but mainstream musical tastes are different enough in mainland, US, and Europe that there’s just not enough musical overlap yet. According to Alexa, TV Links has a traffic rank of 214 and nearly 40% of users are from the U.S.
Missed some movie and don’t feel like buying a DVD? The film United 93, for instance, is available in three parts, here, here and here (and by the way, other options are available too if you don’t like the quality of what this particular user has put up!). Wanna check out what the fuss over Professor Yu Dan is about? Well it looks like her entire series of lectures on Confucian ethics is available (see here and here for instance). Ooh, maybe you, like us, would like to learn Chinese Sign Language instead. Don’t worry, some helpful Chinese netizen has already put up an ENTIRE 22-part video course here!
Related links
China Net Investor: Meet the Founders of “China’s YouTube” Tudou.com
Virtual China: Chinese sharing movies for the world
Tudou vs Youtube? Talk about quantity over quality. Over half the clips on Tudou’s top ten list are just recorded TV shows/ads, while Youtube was used as a submission platform for questions for a Democratic presidential candidate debate. Bandwidth whithers in light of comparisons like that.
And the copyright issue is definitely pertinent.
YouTube is now a wasteland of the trite. I used to watch some decent HBO and Showtime vids but everything kept getting pulled off after the boys sold it. I live in a part of the world where US streaming is not available so I rely on Tudou and Sina and all their links to get me some decent entertainment. I’m grateful they exist. Youtube is bloated with “un”entertainment…a video Facebook. It serves an entirely different purpose than Tudou. The two cannot be compared.