Big Brother arrives in China with online streaming deal for popular reality show

As if China’s citizens don’t have enough Orwellian Big Brother to put up with every day, they will soon be exposed to even more creepy surveillance with the launch of China’s version of Big Brother, the depressingly popular reality show series.

China’s top online video company, Youku Tudou, has just revealed that Endemol, the European production studio that makes Big Brother as well as some actually decent comedies and dramas such as Peaky Blinders, will begin production soon. The Chinese version of Big Brother will screen at the beginning of 2015 and run for 10 weeks.

A scene from Big Brother in the US. (GIF source: Billboard)

As part of the deal, the series will be exclusive to the company’s two sites, Youku and Tudou. Youku has half a billion active online viewers each month.

The Big Brother format – assemble a dozen of a nation’s worst human beings and force them to live together in captivity as “housemates” – is rather old, having first popped up on TV in Europe in 1999. But the new deal is hoping that it’ll be a hit with China’s young video viewers, who generally prefer online content to the stale, state-approved offerings of CCTV, the nation’s broadcaster.

Other popular TV formats have been adapted for China, such as The Voice and Top Gear.

Starting in April next year, China’s media regulator is forcing the country’s video sites to obtain licenses to stream any overseas TV series, which will likely result in many dramas, comedies, and reality shows being effectively banned from the country. In response, China’s video streaming sites are making more of their own content, including working with overseas studios to produce their own “foreign” content.

See: China doesn’t want ‘losers’ to become trendy, bans hugely popular web series