14 years ago, he started a newspaper. Now, he’s making one-minute news videos

Photo credit: gmast3r / 123RF.

Qiu Bing is an old-school reporter. He’s been in the industry for more than 20 years and still insists on reading paper copies of The Global Times and Southern Weekly, two Chinese newspapers that have been around since the 80s and 90s. He chain-smokes as we talk, occasionally sipping a small cup of loose-leaf tea.

“I’m a fanatic about words. I love writing,” he tells Tech in Asia. “I love expressing myself with words, and I think the magic of written words cannot be totally visualized.” Movies, for instance, more often than not, ruin the novels they’re supposed to portray, he says.

“Still, pivoting [to video] is something we had to do,” he adds.

It’s pretty difficult to get people to read a 4,000- to 5,000-word article.

Qiu Bing is the founder and president of Pear Video, a video-based media startup headquartered in Beijing. Launched last November, the startup’s video app offers a broad range of content. It runs short news snippets, like Trump’s signing of the Keystone Pipeline, as well as cooking footage and gadget clips. Each video is only a few minutes long – the sweet spot being a minute or less, he says.

It’s a far cry from Qiu Bing’s last venture, The Paper, an online news site that made a name for itself with investigative, longform pieces.

“Right now, especially for China’s post-90’s generation, it’s pretty difficult to get people to read a 4,000- to 5,000-word article,” he explains. In particular, long articles aren’t well-suited for mobile devices. However, as China moves from 4G to 5G and data becomes even cheaper – maybe even free – “the masses will look towards videos to get information,” he says.

Qiu Bing, founder and president of Pear Video. Photo credit: Lu Haitao.

China’s media landscape has no shortage of online video startups. And no wonder – it’s a market estimated to be worth US$13.9 billion by 2020. Video streaming heavyweights, such as iQiyi and Alibaba’s Youku-Tudou,  focus on entertainment, like TV shows and movies. Then there’s the clutch of smaller user-generated content (UGC) apps,  like Miaopai, a video app backed by Weibo, China’s Twitter equivalent

However, Qiu Bing believes that Pear Video can carve out a niche for itself. Unlike UGC, Pear Video’s content is edited for quality and fact-checked.

“UGC is good for capturing emotions, singing, cats, dogs, shots of a ball game, but for communicating information, you need a certain means – there’s a threshold,” he says. That’s where he hopes journalists can play a role.

Citizen journalists

Pear Video currently puts out almost 1,000 videos per day, says Qiu Bing. By the end of the year, the startup wants to push that number to 2,000. That’s a dizzying amount of content for a startup that began less than half a year ago.

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