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Closing of video sites has viewers reeling
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OVER the weekend, Chinese consumers’ viewing of foreign video content was further squeezed with the shutdown of two major websites known for free distribution of subtitles or subtitled videos of foreign-language movies and TV dramas.
Video-sharing site YYeTs.com and subtitle-sharing site shooter.cn put up official statements on their home pages without giving concrete reasons for the closure.
Both sites are among the largest and most influential of their kind, providing content from the US, the UK, Japan and South Korea, among other countries whose movies, TV dramas and variety shows are popular in China.
Since they have before survived constant anti-piracy crackdowns in recent years that have resulted in the closure of hundreds of content-sharing sites and physical markets, some are wondering if this is the end of an era.
In April 2013, Beijing police shut the country’s biggest high-definition movie site (siluhd.com) and detained some of its top officials including the CEO. Realizing that they could be physically arrested and sued, operators and organizers of many content-sharing sites shut down out of fear.
It has been an unwritten rule that large-scale crackdowns are launched every year around April 26, the World Intellectual Property Day. Video-sharing sites shut down temporarily and physical shops pretend to sell copyrighted discs only.
“It usually takes a few days or weeks, and then everything is back to normal,” says Zhu, former operator of a video-sharing site that has closed down permanently. “Not anymore. It has become more serious. Every time we reopened, we lost some content and ran bigger risks. After a while, it was just too much pressure and we decided to just let it go.”
YYeTs and Shooter have also been out of service before, shut down temporarily, but they have both survived with most of their content still available for free sharing, until now.
To many, it’s a sign that ... “this time, it is serious,” says marketing specialist Mark Wang, who is in his early 30s.
Like many of his peers or those even younger, downloading and watching foreign TV dramas has become a part of his life. Every Friday night, Wang checks for updates on his favorite shows including “Homeland,” “Doctor Who” and “Masters of Sex,” among others. He queues up downloads for about 30 episodes of various dramas, and sometimes a few movies, for the entire following week.
“It has been getting increasingly difficult to download. With these last two sites shutting down, I can hear my farewell to free foreign dramas. I can’t really think of any big sites still operating,” he adds. “I may as well start picking up my English.”
It is a joke shared by many on the Internet.
The topic “Farewell to American TV dramas” became an instant hit on Sina weibo on Sunday, and has remained so into yesterday. Various articles relevant to the topic have been shared and read thousands of times.
Many are nostalgic about the two sites, which had been main forces behind US TV dramas evolving from a niche taste unavailable to most people to a mainstream weekly habit among many white-collar workers in cities like Shanghai and Beijing.
While Shooter is down fully, YYeTs has been operating through more low-profile methods, updating subtitled version links on its backup sites despite netizens’ outcry over its main site.
Netizens are speculating about why, how and what happens from now on.
Some point fingers at the anti-piracy campaign, mainly the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), while others are concerned it is China’s own State Administration of Press, Publication, Film and Television, which won’t allow uncensored content to be floating around.
“What’s going to be left from ‘Game of Thrones’ or ‘Two Broken Girls’ after they are trimmed?” a netizen named “Bigbang forever” posted on weibo. “Oh, wait, they probably won’t ever be censored because they will never be aired.”
In April, four popular US dramas including “Game of Thrones” were removed from all Chinese streaming sites. Later, a dubbed version of “Game of Thrones” was aired on a pay channel affiliated with CCTV, where the original version had been aired earlier.
Some Chinese fans complained about the dubbing, but it went mostly unnoticed because most people still downloaded the show from the Internet.
At the end of October, MPAA submitted a piracy list to the United States Trade Representative (USTR) as part of a lobbying effort to get them on the USTR “Notorious Markets List.”
The MPAA named some of the top illicit cyberlockers, video-sharing sites and physical markets around the world, including YYeTs. China’s peer-to-peer site Xunlei and Hailong Electronics Shopping Mall in Beijing.
In its submission, the MPAA called YYeTs “the most popular dedicated download site for copyrighted content in China,” and said it provided links to 67 other popular sites in China, with 1,829,052 unique visitors in August.
In previous MPAA reports, China has always been listed among countries with the highest piracy rates, with about 90 percent of its movies pirated.
About 60 foreign movies are released annually in China, a country where the box office soared to 21.7 billion yuan (US$3.5 billion) in 2013. The size of the movie market is projected to continue growing rapidly while the quota on imported films is expected to be further relaxed, providing a reason for American studios to be worried about their loss in future profits.
“Maybe it is the start of a new era, when we must pay for content,” says former video-sharing site operator Zhu. “It’s been 10 to 15 years that we either don’t pay or pay little to see pirated contents, but now all these Chinese websites are paying large amounts of money for American TV dramas.
“Maybe it is just going to be a new lifestyle,” he concludes.
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