Baidu joins crowded video market in China

China's video websites face fierce competition after the biggest search engine in China-Baidu-joins the market with its qiyi.com.

According to its CEO Gong Yu, Baidu's Qiyi will sign contracts with TV stations and movie studios to get authorized contents, resembling the profit pattern of Hulu.com, a major video website in the United States.

After rounds of crackdown on the pirate videos, the video website market witnessed the end of the dogfight stage. Youku and Tudou topped the rank of the survived websites with Ku6 acquired by Shenda.

It seems that the profit-making stage has begun. Some heavyweight players debuted the market right in time, including Sohu, Sina, Shenda(with Ku6), Netease, CNTV and Xinhua TV.

A new round of dogfight emerges with each sharpening their teeth.

These websites can be classified into three types. Video websites like youku and tudou are the first batch of those after Youtube in China, the so-called video-sharing websites. Sohu,Sina,Netease and Shenda are listed companies in Nasdaq, and video websites are merely part of their business. CNTV and Xinhua TV are supported by CCTV and Xinhua News Agency, the so-called "national team."

The Youtube pattern is proved to be unsuccessful in China since many people only enjoy sharing pirate movies and TV series, most downloaded from Internet. The download fever even resulted in a large number of U.S. TV seris fans.

The favoured Hulu pattern flourished with more players' participation. With burdens of bandwidth cost and copyright purchase, the video websites still have a long way to go before making profits, according to analysis.

In my opinion, the biggest problem for video websites lies in the quality content shortage. The director-centered TV and movie producing pattern posed the biggest obstacle to the development of content. The websites should not be filled with duplicated contents of TV channels and theaters.

When the channel or platform of video contents is staged, it comes to the contest of quality.