In good news for square-eyed fans of TV shows, the web apps on the front page of Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU), China’s biggest search engine, now alert users to when a new episode of their favourite show is available online. Just add a TV series into the bookmarks section of the site (as pictured above) and it’ll give out alerts on a daily or weekly basis, depending on when the show airs.
According to the Baidu blog today, among its claimed 500 million users, “roughly 20 percent of all searches are for TV shows.” I’m no maths genius, but 20 percent of a really big number is a pretty big number, so clearly it’s worth making it easier for people to keep track of their shows. The only catch is that, like with its rival’s iGoogle, it requires you to be signed-in to see all your neatly laid-out web apps and other customizations.
After testing it out, I see it works well. After adding a TV series to your bookmarks, you can click it to be taken to a sort of ‘series page’ on the Baidu Video site that details all the seasons and episodes available. From there you choose the video-streaming site on which you’d like to watch the show – in the example below there were five choices, including the Baidu-owned Qiyi – and then the content plays in a frame whilst still on the Baidu Video site:
Movies and licensed TV shows are a hugely competitive area on the Chinese web as they pull in tens/hundreds of millions of users and can attract some big-buck advertisers. But it’s an increasingly costly business in China, with the recent record set of one video site paying 1 million RMB (US$158,000) per episode for a classic serial drama. Korean and American TV series are really popular, in addition to Chinese titles.
On a peripheral note, earlier today we reported how Youku’s own video search engine has been challenged by three rivals who have decided to block it from indexing their own video content.
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