American TV series enter the era of strict inspection ahead of time, and cloud storage becomes the biggest beneficiary

On February 27, the eighth day of the first lunar month, although the warmth of the Spring Festival holiday was still lingering, a group of private American TV drama translation organizations had already prepared for their first "battle" in the Year of the Sheep. Including the Renren Subtitles Group, which had announced its dissolution, they were all preparing for a politically themed American TV drama - House of Cards.

One hour after the third season of House of Cards was released on Netflix in the United States that afternoon, raw content (versions without Chinese subtitles) began to appear for download on several well-known domestic cloud storage services. With the help of QQ, Weibo and Moments, these download links spread rapidly, bringing a group of new users to the above-mentioned cloud storage services.

Unlike these peripheral beneficiaries, Sohu Video, which has purchased the exclusive rights to broadcast the drama, failed to broadcast it simultaneously. An insider of Sohu Video told Tencent Technology that the drama is still under review and the specific broadcast date is to be determined.

Another video website had already prepared to quietly intercept the opportunity. After keyword optimization, the BBC version of "House of Cards" Season 3 (British drama) they owned quickly gained a high ranking on search engines and its traffic surged.

More online video industry practitioners expressed their concerns to Tencent Technology. According to the regulations issued by the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television last year, starting from April 1, 2015, unregistered foreign films and TV series may not be broadcast online. There is still one month to April 1, but the future censorship standards are not optimistic.

Coincidentally, before "House of Cards", several video websites such as LeTV, iQiyi, and Tencent Video claimed that they would launch the popular American movie "Fifty Shades of Grey", but then announced that it could not be launched due to special reasons.

As the deadline for strict inspection of online dramas approaches, the once peaceful video industry chain may see the following major changes:

Video sites return to cautious cloud storage benefits

In recent years, as the government has stepped up its efforts to crack down on piracy, major video websites have also increased their investment in purchasing copyrights of American TV series. As regulatory policies tighten, video websites' enthusiasm for American TV series has declined, and copyright prices will return to rationality.

In the short term, the most direct consequence of “review before broadcast” is that online piracy may become more serious again.

Lawyer Liu Chunquan of Pan-Ocean Law Firm believes that the conventional way to combat piracy is to use the legitimate market to seize the pirated market. If legitimate resources cannot satisfy the user base, pirated resources will definitely seize the market during the review cycle of the competent authorities, leaving a gray space for pirates to survive.

Although Sagittarius.com and Renren Video announced their closures last year, QVOD was under criminal investigation, and Xunlei has stepped up its efforts to combat piracy after its listing, after the collapse of traditional film and television resource search websites, a large number of overseas drama fans can still find their own way to watch.

More small and medium-sized resource websites can still provide downloads, and pirated resources can be obtained through more covert dissemination channels such as network disks and cloud disks, which makes supervision more difficult. Now, soon after a popular movie is released, related video links, download seeds and other resources often begin to appear on Weibo, Tieba and various forums. Weibo has become a dissemination position, sharing video files and extracting passwords through various network disks and cloud disks, allowing netizens to download them by themselves.

Tencent Technology discovered on a movie website called Kanba that some content resources will be directly built into the playback windows of major video websites. When searching for some movies and other resources, there will be a link prompt of "Baidu Cloud Disk - Need to download or watch online" after clicking it. After clicking it, you will directly enter the viewing or downloading address of Baidu Cloud Disk.

An American drama fan once said in an interview with the media that "The Big Bang Theory" was banned last year, but fans can still easily obtain resources if they want to watch it, but the process is more cumbersome and hidden.

A person who has been paying close attention to the webmaster industry once told Tencent Technology that there are currently more than 2 million small and medium-sized film and television sites in China, many of which actually use foreign servers, pay monthly fees, and use the method of building website groups to prevent the website from being blocked by domestic IP, which also increases the efforts to combat piracy.

There are two main types of small and medium-sized websites. The first type is a film and television resource website that only provides search and links, and does not have its own servers and video content; the second type is a content search portal that also directly rents servers from IDCs and stores a large amount of pirated video content, which is downloaded from major regular video websites or directly purchased from CDs and copied and uploaded.

The relationship between the above two types of film and television stations is that the first type of website is actually just a shell, with extremely low production costs and fast speed. Its video source is in cooperation with the second type, and the advertising revenue is shared according to the number of clicks, with a share ratio of 60% or higher.

In order to obtain more traffic, small and medium-sized film sites also cooperate with each other to reverse traffic through links. After the larger film and television sites have established content resource platforms, they often set up site clusters. In other words, webmasters will build many film and television sites with different domain names, but the final resource links actually point to the same content platform.

The grading system may arrive earlier

Wang Zhaonan, deputy editor-in-chief of iQiyi, believes that in terms of content guidance, the government would rather "loosen" than "block" and explore the classification of video content, including the American dramas that have been introduced, so that the right people can watch the right content. The user ID should be linked to the ID card so that netizens under the age of 18 cannot watch video content with restricted elements.

Discussions on the film rating system have been ongoing in China's film and Internet video industries, but the absence of mainstream official voices has made it difficult for the industry to reach a consensus.

Around 2010, Zhao Shi, then deputy director of the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television, represented the government and said at a press conference on cultural system reform that China would not adopt such an approach regarding the film rating system. He said that in theory, film ratings can meet the needs of audiences of different ages and levels, but in practice, there has been no very successful experience.

After that, the idea of ​​“rating” was suppressed for a while, but the film industry is still making related attempts. Bona International Film Group had planned to remind minors and the elderly to be cautious when watching movies containing violent and erotic content from the perspective of serving the audience, but did not impose restrictions on ticket purchases.

The tense atmosphere of this attempt was not released until President Xi Jinping visited South Korea, which led to the signing of the "China-South Korea Film Co-production Agreement" between the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism of South Korea and the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television. The agreement stipulates that China-South Korea co-productions will enjoy the same treatment as domestic films in the Chinese market and will no longer be subject to the restrictions of imported films. The industry once believed that China's film censorship system would be relaxed.

In fact, the entire cultural industry is forcing policymakers to reflect. At the end of 2014, Lu Yufei, a doctor of brain science at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, launched China's first private children's film and television rating system - China Children's Film and Television Rating Standards, which classified some of the released films according to the degree of "harm" and marked the standards for different ages. The discussion about the rating system has once again sparked heated debate.

In response to the recent "re-production" and deletion of the domestic TV series "The Empress of China", the current deputy director of the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television, Tian Jin, revealed that the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television found that the series did have problems with inadequate revisions, and ordered the investment and production institutions to make revisions before broadcasting in accordance with the law.

However, industry experts still believe that this statement is too formal and that "the relevant provisions of our country's laws are too vague and the laws should be amended as soon as possible to clearly define their meaning."

However, with the latest "Regulations" issued by the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television at the end of 2014, the so-called most stringent "smoking ban" in history was implemented. It can be seen that policy makers are paying attention to this issue of public concern, but arbitrary "one-size-fits-all" policies are difficult to be recognized by the industry.

What the industry still expects is some practical evaluation standards. At present, it seems that we can only hope that the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television can take small steps and seek breakthroughs.

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.