Tudou
Tudou, Inc. (simplified Chinese: 土豆网; traditional Chinese: 土豆網; pinyin: Tǔdòu Wǎng; lit. 'Potato Net') is a Chinese video-sharing website headquartered in Shanghai, China, where users can upload, view and share video clips. Tudou went live on April 15, 2005 and by September 2007 served over 55 million videos each day.[1]
Type of business
English
February 15, 2005
Gary Wang, CEO
Sam Lai, CFO
Grace Wang, CAO
Sarah Jiang, CCO
Evelyn Wang, CSO
Deng Wei, VP
Anita Huang, VP
Yongzhu Song, VP
Yu Bin, VP
Optional
(required to upload)
April 15, 2005
Active
In 2007 Tudou was one of the world's largest bandwidth users, moving more than 1 Petabyte per day to 7 million users. YouTube serves a larger number of videos per day, but the average Tudou video is longer in duration, meaning the total number of minutes of video being streamed daily from Tudou is significantly larger - about 15 billion minutes vs. 3 billion for YouTube.[1]
The Shanghai-based service uses Adobe Flash technology to publish more than 50,000 new videos each day, including amateur content such as videoblogging and original videos, movie and TV clips, and music videos. Unregistered users can watch videos on the site, while registered users are permitted to upload an unlimited number of videos, using on-line and Windows-based upload tools.[2]
On March 12, 2012, it was announced that Youku reached an agreement to acquire Tudou in a stock-for-stock transaction, and the new entity will be named Youku Tudou Inc.[3]
Funding[edit]
Tudou completed its financial fund series A to E between year 2005 to 2010 in November 2005, April 2006, April 2007, April 2008, and August 2010 respectively. A total of US$135 million was raised from a roster of venture capital organizations including IDG Ventures China, Jafco Asia, GGV Capital, General Catalyst Partners, Capital Today, KTB, JAIC, Cyber Agent, Venrock, Crescent Point, and Temasek Holdings.
Recent events[edit]
In July 2007, Tudou introduced one of the world's first large-scale video advertising systems for video sites, several months ahead of YouTube.[9] In late September 2007, Intel and Tudou announced a partnership to explore wireless video sharing technologies and video applications for mobile devices. Tudou also agreed to increase its use of Intel CPUs in its rapidly growing video encoder server farms. Intel will also promote its products through the Tudou advertising system.[10]
In December 2007, Tudou introduced videos in the H.264 format, providing higher quality and standards-based video.[11]
In the aftermath of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake on May 12, the service of the website was suspended until May 21 due to the period of national mourning.
On September 10, 2008, Tudou received its license[12] from SARFT.
Copyright and video review[edit]
Copyright[edit]
A portion of Tudou's content comes from commercial sources and is not user-generated. The company says that the Chinese often go to Tudou for TV-like saq-media, instead of using their televisions. Starting 2008 Tudou launched licensed content acquisition and partnership programs aggregating selective premium professional contents. Nevertheless, Tudou still comes under criticism for its disregard of some copyright policies.
Video review[edit]
Tudou's in-house reviewers watch, approve, and categorize all uploaded videos. The reviewers screen for inappropriate content such as pornography and categorize / tag each video.[13]
Technical notes[edit]
Video format[edit]
Tudou's video playback technology is based on Macromedia's Flash Player. This technology allows the site to display videos with quality comparable to more established video playback technologies (such as Windows Media Player, QuickTime and RealPlayer) that generally require the user to download and install a web browser plugin in order to view video. Flash also requires a plug-in, but the Flash 7 plug-in is generally considered to be present on approximately 90% of online computers.[14] The video can also be played back with gnash(cannot) or VLC. It has pixel dimensions of 320 by 240 (4:3) or 352 by 264 (16:9), depending on the aspect ratio of the source video. Videos run at 25 frames per second with a maximum data rate of 300 kbit/s.
Tudou accepts uploaded videos in a variety of formats, including .WMV, .AVI, .MOV, MPEG and .MP4.[2]
Video can be seen in windowed mode or full screen mode; it is possible to switch the mode during the viewing of any video without reloading it because of the full-screen function of Adobe Systems Flash Player 9.
Because of the copyright and licensing issues, some Tudou videos are blocked to international IP addresses.
Bandwidth[edit]
Tudou reports that it's one of the world's largest bandwidth users, sending over 1PB (Petabyte) of video files per day, which is nearly 100 Gbit/s of sustained traffic. The company uses a variety of proprietary and commercial content distribution networks (CDNs), such as ChinaCache to distribute videos around China.[15]
The domain tudou.com attracted almost 10 million visitors annually by 2008 according to a Compete.com survey.[16]