The Weekend Read

[jbowen (Bow)]

Another great article from David. Well worth a look, refreshing after a load of junk mail.
Thanks

[beluga (Gary)]

I never heard about bullet comments before.

The site also gained some fame for creating bullet comments. These are comments that users can post on videos and have them scroll across the screen, from right to left, at a set time.

Interesting firm.

[EdZ]

A minor point, but that type of timestamped positioned/scrolling comments came from NicoVideo (AKA Niconico AKA Nico Nico Douga) several years earlier.

[ChineseInvestor]

The first thing I do, when I occasionally watch videos on their site, is to turn the “bullet comment” off. It’s the most useless feature that a video site can invent in my opinion.

Maybe I’m too old for that but I think it’s more of a “leftover” feature pre “live video” era.

[beluga (Gary)]

I see what you mean. It’s an interesting gimmick!

Is this site doing well in China?

[ChineseInvestor]

I’m not an investor in them nor tracking them so not sure about how they are doing financially. But they’ve got their audiences.

The problem of video streaming sites in China is that there are simply too many of them and I can’t simply see anything special about any one of them. Here’s a few well known ones, iQiYi (public), QQ video (privately owned by Tencent), YouKu (public), Sohu Video (privately owned by Sohu.com), iXigua (private). Bilibili is another one but is probably more unique compare to others because it has more Gen-Z stuff especially animes on it. But in general, I don’t think there’s much loyalty from customers to any of them. It’s all about what content they’ve got, e.g. big hitter shows, which all requires a lot of capitals to either buy the rights or produce the shows.

In terms of UGC, I think those sites are no where near what YouTube offers and they just don’t provide the same level of rewards that you can get from YouTube. This is understandable given the issue around freedom of speech in China. And I haven’t counted the number of short video apps, like KuaiShou (known as TikTok here) in China.

My personal way of using these sites are simply follow the shows (Chinese shows) I’m interested in and just use the platform that has it. If the site is blocking me from watching in the UK (many of them does that especially for the premium shows), I just google it out and there’s always some small websites in China also stream them (these might be legal but could be pirated).