BEIJING, CHINA – China’s copycat version of YouTube is aiming for a Nasdaq listing, Reuters reported Tuesday. Tudou, which means potato in Chinese, is currently ramping up its efforts for the listing. The Washington Post reported last month that executives from the company were making the rounds in the U.S. meeting with potential partners and investors. The company also recently released a recruitment posting for a public relations director.
YouTube, owned by Google, has been blocked in Mainland China since March. In July, the country began blocking Facebook and Twitter. China rarely comments on its decision to block Internet sites, but the conventional wisdom is often that banned sites contain some content that the government finds politically sensitive.
The Chinese government’s decision to ban American websites is less about maintaining its power and more about establishing its own domestic brands. Chinese websites exhibit virtually no innovation and are generally cheap copies of popular Western sites - except written in Chinese characters. Every advertising dollar – or yuan – that can go to Chinese owned and operated companies will help China develop that much faster. In the end, it’s about profits, not politics.
Comments
Calling Tudou a "copycat" of YouTube simply shows the author, Glen Loveland's ignorance and China-bashing mindset. The reality is that Tudou actually went live about 8 days BEFORE the very first YouTube was uploaded! Technically Tudou is more sophisticated because it serves much more video bandwidth using a variety of proprietary and commercial content distribution networks (CDNs), such as ChinaCache to distribute videos around China. Learn before you talk if you don't want to sound dumb.
1. Tudou went live on April 15, 2005 and by September 2007, served over 55 million videos each day.
2. The first YouTube video was entitled Me at the zoo, and shows founder Jawed Karim at San Diego Zoo. The video was uploaded on April 23, 2005, and can still be viewed on the site.
"Knowledgeable"
You're delusional. I can't access Youtube and I'm stuck with China's awful alternatives, Tudou and Youku. The quality is almost always terrible(welcome to China!)...
Youtube is far superior despite your laughable efforts to suggest otherwise...haha.
Pete,
I have access to both YouTube and Tudou from the US. Tudou's quality is as good as YouTube even though I am half globe away.
Pete,
Network video quality depends on two things:
1. Resolution
Both YouTube and Tudou use standard video encoding and choose a resolution that balances quality and bandwidth. Therefore resolution is simply a technical choice.
2. Bandwidth
It largely depends on the network. Tudou serves more bandwidth and its videos are much longer than YouTube' length limit.
Therefore you are delusional to say Tudou has lower quality because there is no technical reason for much difference between the two.
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