In China, Alibaba now lets you invest in TV and movie projects | Hacker News Reader

In China, Alibaba now lets you invest in TV and movie projects

thenextweb.com

27 pointsmlchild11 comments

Plenty of action ongoing in the TV space in China, * ZTE and The9 are producing a TV Game smart box, * Baidu's Iqiyi has overtaken Youku (youtube of china) in active users * Xunlei and BesTV creating a set top box to tap into the internet TV sector * Alibaba also bought 60% of Chinavision for $805M * Xioami (the smartphone maker) invested $200M into Xunlei and created Xiaomi TV focused on film and video content.

The space in China is really hotting up.

I'm surprised Iqiyi has overtaken youku and tudou, or even letv. Original content in China still sucks being mostly costume dramas, patriotic stuff that no one under 50 watches, or poor imitations of Korean dramas (or better yet, just show the original Korean dramas with subtitles). I'm not sure if there is much to get excited about, yet.

What do you want to see from the Chinese then since you live in China? I assume you are fluent in Chinese in this case.

I am Chinese and I watch Chinese drama with my parents, almost every night. While Chinese drama plots tend to repeat over and over (there is always some love triangle involved), I don't find them boring.

First I enjoy watching drama with my family at the dinner table. Two I feel that there is an urge for me to finish the drama to confirm my "theory" of the plot. The same can be said about the Western drama. Recently Western drama seems to be around apocalypse and new human civilization. What makes a drama boring is the combination of either or both the quality of the actors and the pace of the story.

I'm only semi-fluent, my wife is fluent, but is, typical of her friends, mostly into western TV shows and Korean soaps.

China is to startups, what Australia is to evolution. They are both these amazing walled ecosystems that develop completely independent forms of life (digital or otherwise.)

What confuses me is that the Chinese do this in plain sight and yet the American startup ecosystem doesn't seem to give them much mention. I hardly even seen TechCrunch or Pando talking about Chinese startups, while at the same time they are willing to talk about London, Berlin and Tel Aviv startups. I've always wondered if this was because of some latent racism, or because of the foreigness of the Chinese characters.

Either way, it's interesting to think that parts of the forefront of innovation isn't being reported (this story aside), and that there's a whole world of technology culture that's developing independently in China in part because of the totalitarian political regime.

I, for one, think that digital currencies are going to explode in China - the Chinese love to gamble on things like this, and the Yuan is a joke. I believe that it might just be the most opaque currency in the world. (But I don't know much about all the other ones that are in the running. Nor do I know how much the other currencies are lying.)

Startups in China focus mainly on copying ideas, either from abroad, or from each other; its not a very healthy market to be in. I had a friend tell me what was behind Kaifu's Innovation Works, and how it wasn't economical right now to do anything but sure bets (i.e. copies) in the current investment environment.

If you are interested in clones, then China is a fabulous place to look at how everything is copied and adapted locally since Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, and so on, aren't even allowed to operate in the country.

The CCP won't tolerate digital currencies; they even just shutdown alipay this weekend.

I've heard a BBC report on the very same issue (Alibaba crowdfunding movies) and it was said, that the big problem is the lack of creative talent.

Yes, as a country they are still catching up.

They need to copy the west for a while yet to become more equal then they can start thinking about innovation.

That said this is pretty far ahead of the west. I'd love to invest in directors I believe in, giving them full freedom and profiting from it if it succeeds.

Could be huge - given that China had it's biggest year ever in box office last year ($3.6 billion)

Interesting timing with the oculus rift purchase and pissed off kickstarter supporters.

Doubt many of those supporters were in china.

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