Beijing and Shanghai may lie almost 1,000 miles apart, but their metro riders share one thing in common. Each morning, commuters hunch over smartphones or tablets to watch the latest Chinese or Korean TV drama or Hollywood movies downloaded from the Internet.
Chances are, those videos are downloaded or streamed for free—via legal means or pirated.
But that may be set to change.
Internet and media giants are making massive bets in content and technologies, aiming to disrupt China’s long-standing culture of free Web entertainment.
Their goal: encourage people to pay for content.
Appetite for Videos
China’s online video market is expected to reach RMB 36.8 billion (US$5.8 billion) in 2015, a 50 percent increase from 2014, according to iResearch, a Chinese Internet consultancy. Around RMB 15.2 billion of that figure comes from online video advertising, with the remainder consisting of subscriptions and purchases.
While that’s seems high, online video is still a small portion of the RMB 209 billion (US$32.9 billion) Chinese Internet users expect to spend in overall online entertainment, which includes music and games.
