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6 SEP 5, 2014 2:31 PM EDT
By Adam Minter
At first glance, the Chinese government’s announcement of regulations restricting foreign programming that can be shown on Chinese streaming-video sites would appear to be very bad news for business. After all, foreign programming — especially shows produced in the U.S., Europe, Japan and Korea — is wildly successful in China. In April, when “The Big Bang Theory” and three other popular programs were pulled from streaming sites by government order, there was widespread public outrage.
That’s hardly surprising. According to China’s broadcast regulator, as reported by the Wall Street Journal, foreign programs are so popular that they account for more than half the television content on popular Chinese video websites. Not all of them are successful, of course. But those that are popular — Korean soap operas, “House of Cards,” the BBC’s “Sherlock” series, to name some recent examples — have a tendency to reach the top of most-viewed lists, dominate social media and become national topics of conversation. That results in part from the fact that streaming video sites are subject to far less regulation and censorship than television in China — a fact that naturally galls the country’s state-controlled television industry and programmers. It also seems to bother Chinese President Xi Jinping, who has been busy promoting the establishment of new media groups. Sooner or later, the government was going to tighten its grip on video streams.
On Friday afternoon, China’s broadcast regulator issued a notice that the new rules — which aren’t yet public — will go into effect next spring. According to Bloomberg News, they’ll require streaming sites to register foreign films and TV programs with the government and restrict foreign programs to 30 percent of a streaming site’s content.
For streaming sites, which compete fiercely for the rights to foreign programs (producers of popular Korean programs can ask as much as $300,000 for a single episode, according to the Wall Street Journal), that might be the best news they’ve received since the invention of the Internet.