Items Tagged With CultureFish Media

So before everyone starts freaking out over drive by media coverage of the new regulations in China affecting video sharing sites, I thought I'd get my friend and CEO of CultureFish Media, Lonnie Hodge to weigh in on what he thinks the new regulations likely mean. In his own words:

It feels a bit like everyone is crying "wolf" or "totalitarian"a bit early.
The government has not said anything specifically about Youtube yet. In the case of Skype a few years ago China openly threatened to restrict access because they perceived Skype as a threat to China Telecom. But in the end, when CTC's stock kept blowing through the roof, the saber-rattles ceased. I use Skype daily.

The Chinese video share sites are not pulling in a lot of revenue and costs are high, so part of this new mandate may be in part protectionist.
Christine is right: this does not differ from controls already in place for websites, individuals and portals. China is choosing to regulate the Internet in much the same way the FCC controls TV and radio in America.

I think it is too soon to get hysterical. And my guess is the average Chinese netizen is going to prefer Chinese content--censored or not--over lots of Youtube offerings. And as stated above: any savvy user here knows how to bypass the controls. Also, Youtube loads terribly slow here on this developing system of relays and bandwidth, so a lot of Chinese just avoid Youtube anyway. I no longer assign Youtube videos to my students to watch because the school servers are just to slow to make it a reasonable request.

Google videos have been blocked here for as long as I can remember. How will this be any different?

I also think the comments that have been left regarding this on the TechCrunch article are quite interesting for getting other people's thoughts and concerns.

My own personal take on it is there too. Basically, I spent 5 years in China working for a foreign company involved in both retail and broadcast television - 2 industries that were hands off to foreign companies on the books. Key word, on the books. The government needs to put something regarding online video sharing on the books. As Lonnie mentioned, no different from the FCC in the U.S. and its regulations right? I don't think these regulations are going to be detrimental to the online video sharing sites as regardless of people's personal issues on the matter, companies operating in China already practice their own form of self censorship anyways.

For more insight you can also refer to a few good blogs who's weighed in on this issue as well:

China Media Project

Danwei.org

Ogilvy Digital Watch

TechBlog86

Little Red Blog