Video streaming site in China says it’s finally getting people to pay up, hits 5M subscribers

After fighting for hard-to-acquire users over the past decade, China’s streaming video sites are facing a new battle – getting people to pay for the service. While the vast majority of the TV shows and movies in China are available for free, supported by a growing number of adverts, local video sites are now pushing for premium memberships.

iQiyi – which is owned by search engine giant Baidu – revealed today that it just topped five million paid subscribers. Yang Xianghua, iQiyi’s senior VP, concedes this is “a small portion of our over 500 million users,” but he says there’s still a lot of room for growth. Plus, he claims that iQiyi is now the industry leader in China in terms of premium subscriber numbers.

iQiyi’s website pictured today

China’s top video site in terms of views is the merged Youku Tudou company, which gets 900 million views each day from 150 million daily active users. Youku, however, has not revealed the number of subscribers it currently has.

An iQiyi representative explained to Tech in Asia that the five million figure does not include people who pay for a one-off premium movie. iQiyi’s monthly plan starts at RMB 20 (US$3.20) per month, or RMB 200 (US$32.30) per year.

Alibaba battle

iQiyi’s numbers come days after Alibaba announced an upcoming HBO-Netflix-style service, called Tmall Box Office. The service would be accessible only to paying users, in contrast to the free access of all of China’s other video sites.

Streaming video is one of China’s hottest – and most expensive – web battlegrounds, enveloping Alibaba, Baidu, Xiaomi, Youku, Tencent, LeTV, Sohu, and several other players.

Xiaomi, which has its own TV operating system that appears in its smart TV and set-top box models, took a US$300 million stake in iQiyi late last year as part of a drive to boost its content offerings.

Like most of China’s top video sites, iQiyi licenses TV shows and movies from China and other countries. iQiyi said today that it plans to acquire around one thousand titles from Hollywood this year.