Youku today announced it has signed a three-year deal with Warner Bros’ China joint-venture, CAV Warner Home Entertainment, to “add a total of 400 to 450 Warner Bros New Releases and Catalog titles” to their pay-to-view Youku Premium site.
It’s not Youku’s first tie-up with the US film studio, having licensed the hit thriller Inception from Warner Bros last year.
Just the other day, my colleague Li Chen wrote about how China’s video sites are needing to spend big to pay for increasingly pricey copyrighted content. In contrast, Tudou.com, over the weekend, announced it would stop trying to compete in terms of licensed shows, and instead focus on self-made and user-generated content.
However, Youku is clearly opting to wow its users with the biggest-name titles, at any cost. Youku’s CFO, Liu De-le, says in the press release:
Over the past year we’ve seen Chinese Internet users become more sophisticated in terms of what they’ll spend money on. People are increasingly willing to pay for high quality content, and we take the growth of Youku Premium as a sign that the market is improving for paid services.
Youku Premium is the site’s showcase platform, being closely watched by the industry to see if users are willing to pay enough. Inception, and most of Youku’s paid video content, costs only RMB 5 – about 70 cents USD – to watch.
Youku reveals it has seen “200,000 paid transactions for its library of more than 300 movies” and thousands of educational TV shows since Youku Premium started in October of last year. The maths on that doesn’t sound too enticing when you consider how much they’ve decided to charge, putting a movie on a par with a mobile app in terms of expense.
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