Tudou launches new website skin; Seven services compared

Tudou, one of the oldest video sharing services in China put forward several new features yesterday.

• They have enlarged the size of the online video player
• New skin of the website
• New feature playlist
• Formally open their iTudou client software (This software has been public for several weeks, but hasn’t been promoted)

There’re at least 150 more similar services in China. We have been tracking some of them that worth looking.

Recently Joy Chan, publisher of the famous gossip blog Postshow, wrote a post analyzed 7 video sharing sites in China: 56.com, mofile.com, 5show.com, tudou.com, pomoho.com, uume.com and 6rooms.com. According to Joy Chan, these 7 sites have top Alexa traffic and all dressed like YouTube.

• Tudou is the first such kind of service launched in April 2005. At that time, YouTube was far less popular than it is today.
• 56.com claimes on their website that they launched in April 2005 too. But till Dec 2005, they haven’t focused on video sharing business. Recently they have got investment from Sequoia.
• Pomoho is operated by ChinaVB. The service launched on Nov 23th, 2005. We found a post explained the strange name of the service.
• 5show launched in Jan 2006. A Hongzhou based startup.
• Mofile is originally an online storage provider. They launched video sharing service in Jun 2006.
• 6rooms launched in Jun 2006 as the sponsor of Huge’s second short film.
• Uume is originally an SNS service. They were acquired by Mop in Aug. 2005. Then they relaunched as a video sharing service in July 2006.

These services all learned the UI from YouTube and provide similar features like video uploading, online viewing, similar video recommendation, social networking and external embedded code.

They all provide large online storage for your videos. 56.com claims you have 5G free quota. Some of them provide unlimited space. Some don’t mention storage limit, we think that means unlimited. Since each video uploaded is limited to less than 100M or so, the online storage they provide are all more than enough for normal users.

Two services we think have problems. One is 5show. They limit each video size to 30M, which is too small for video files. And they don’t support mp4 file format, which is the default format for Nokia handset.

The other is 56.com. On user upload page, it says by uploading videos, you are supposed to agree 56.com use your content in anyway without paying you. That means you lose your copyright.

So how do you choose the best service suitable for you?

• The first consideration should be speed. While in China, sites that is fast for you can be freaking slow for others, so this should be judged by yourself according to your Internet access provider.
• The second consideration should be which community you want to join. 5show is full of self recorded amateur shows with webcam. While Tudou is full of lengthy more professional videos. You can easily discover your peers.
• If you like online recording, 56.com, pomoho, mofile and 5show are your choice. Although we don’t think you can record any high quality video in this way, but there’re much more webcams than camcorders in China.
• If you are looking for client software to enrich your experience. 56.com has a super upload software. Uume provides a desktop software that will download video automatically for you. And Tudou’s iTudou is another example.
• There’re more interesting features worth looking. Mofile provides a limited method for user to download videos thought their online briefcase service. Uume has an MSN bot for you to play with if you never leave your IM interface. 56.com has a WAP interface, so that you can access it though handset.

Who is most likely to win? To be frankly it’s not clear yet, since some of them are only months old. But we believe user experience is the most important. Let’s drop those social features. What left are the core features they are supposed to provide.

1. I can upload my videos.
2. I can manage and show my videos to others in a browser.

Is there anything they can do to improve user experience? Absolute Yes. Even today’s YouTube is not qualified to be called Flickr of video. Why is there not a premium service for me to upload video larger than 100M or let me choose higher online display resolution? Why I cannot download video uploaded by myself? Video sharing services considering this will change the rule of the game.

The last thing to note is that all of the above services did bad SEO jobs. Try to search [anything + 视频 (Chinese word for video)] in Baidu, you don’t get any result in video sharing sites. While if you search [anything + video] in Google, most of the time you get the first result from YouTube.

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