Digital entertainment in China

I wrote the following article that was published in today’s China Daily (CEO Round Table section).


China Daily CEO Round Table

Toodou.com – Digital entertainment from and for China
Marc van der Chijs, co-founder Toodou.com

Toodou.com’s services
In October 2004 the idea was born to set up a Chinese-language website where users could easily publish and download their personal audio and video files. This site, Toodou.com, went live in April this year and became popular very quickly, because of its ease of use and wide variety of available content. Currently the site has about 100,000 registered users, with a growth rate of about 10% per week.

The core digital entertainment services that Toodou.com offers are video and audio files that can be streamed or downloaded automatically to a computer or personal entertainment system (iPod, mobile phone etc.). It offers users a huge variety of different self-made programs, from short documentaries to music videos, and from cooking lessons to people showing their city. People can submit their files and watch programs for free. It can be compared to time-shifted TV or radio: you can listen or watch whenever you want – not only at home, but everywhere you go. Next month Toodou.com will start offering a service to directly stream files to mobile phones.

Infrastructure for digital entertainment
In order for the digital entertainment industry to really take off in China a good infrastructure is essential. High-speed digital networks are a prerequisite for this, especially in the big cities where most people have Internet access. This can be done either by a network of cables or by offering wireless web access all over the city. The government could do this themselves or give incentives to corporations to offer this. Important is that the infrastructure will be cheap enough to use for the average user, meaning low or no user fees.

Speed is important for content that is streamed through the worldwide web. The fact that over half the Chinese Internet population now has access to broadband is a big opportunity. It allows the delivery of higher-quality content with less disruption. The high bandwidth will be an incentive for the entertainment industry in China to further develop applications that require high-speed connections.

In order to get a faster development of the digital entertainment industry it is important that China uses the same standards as the rest of the world. Developing own standards that may work better, may actually hinder the development: The past has learned us that it should not be assumed that the rest of the world will follow once a new, better standard has been developed.

Nationwide Internet access
Although over 100 million people in China have Internet access, this is still less than 10% of China’s population. Out of these 100 million people more than 50 million have at least a college or university degree. Most of these 100 million users are young people living in the big cities on China’s east coast. This means that the distribution of users is very skewed, and that digital entertainment cannot reach a large part of the population. This gap between young vs. old and educated vs. not educated is a challenge that the government could possibly do something about. Just like getting every town and village TV and radio access several years ago, this time the goal can be to get the internet to the countryside. With easy-to-use computers and online teach-the-teacher programs this might be achieved.

Digital future
Toodou.com sees it as its goal to make it easier for Chinese users to find the content and information they are looking for, and to share their films and other programs with the outside world. We think this will help the digital entertainment consumption grow. Eventually we foresee a merger of TV, radio, and mobile phones with digital internet content. Through our site we hope to facilitate this development and prepare China for a digital future.

Link to the article: http://app1.chinadaily.com.cn/focus/ceo/17/perspective.html (scroll down to second article).

Restaurant review: Epicure on 45 – Shanghai's latest revolving restaurant



In the past years several revolving restaurants have been built in Shanghai, among others in the Ocean Hotel, the Jin Jiang Hotel (new tower), the Novotel Atlantis and the Sofitel Oriental in Pudong. The latest one is Epicure on 45, the restaurant on top of the new Radisson Hotel on Nanjing Lu/People’s Square. The building where the Radisson is located was built several years ago, but had been empty ever since (does anybody know why?) until Radisson decided to put a hotel in there.

The location is excellent for a revolving restaurant, with views over People’s Square and Huaihai Lu in the south, then Nanjing Xi Lu with the Marriott in the front and Plaza 66 in the back in the west, part of the Suzhou creek in the north (incl. an excellent view of Toodou.com’s new office) and then Nanjing Dong Lu and the Pudong skyline in the east. I had dinner here last night, and had an excellent experience. We were lucky that the sky was very clear, and you could see many miles around (not very usual in Shanghai!). The restaurant turns very slow, we finished almost one turn during our dinner, which lasted from 7 to 10. I am not an expert, but I think that normally revolving restaurants turn in 60-90 minutes. What makes this restaurant special is that you do not only have the view to the outside, but also to the inside: the different kitchen’s all have glass fronts and are located in the middle of the restaurant. This means that during the turn you can see the cook’s in all the kitchens at work.

The restaurant offers Western, Chinese, Japanese and Indian cuisine, and you can choose your starter and main course from different cuisines. We were offered an amuse after ordering our food, something I always appreciate. I decided to have seared foie gras to begin with. It was in one word excellent. Both the taste and the way it was served were great. I combined it with a glass of Australian Chardonnay, which fitted quite well. Qi decided to go for the beef carpaccio, which she also liked a lot. As a main course I had an Australian Beef Tenderloin with a glass of Beringer Pinot Noir. The meat was very tender and cooked exactly right. Qi had cod fish, which also tasted great (I finished it for her; the portions were not small). For desert I ordered a plate of international cheeses (a blue cheese, Edam, Emmenthaler, and a goat cheese – the waiter did not mention the names to me when serving, a small minus), with a glass of port wine. Also this was very good, and I truly enjoyed it.

Any negative points? Not many, although the service could still be improved a bit. The waiters do not speak English very well, which is always a problem in China, and have difficulty understanding what you order. The drinks did not come on time with the food, and the main course was not served for both of us at the same time (for which they immediately apologized). The great food and atmosphere completely compensated this, and I would highly recommend the restaurant to everyone. We paid less than RMB 1400 for the food and wine, which I feel is reasonable for this kind of restaurant and location.

Shanghai Formula One tickets not selling well

The Shanghai Daily reported today that the ticket sales for this weekend’s F1 race are not as good as last year. The promotor for the race thinks that about 110,000 people will attend the main race, compared to 150,000 last year.

I am not sure whether announcing this is a smart move. The reason is that in China you are normally able to get cheap tickets right before an event starts if it is not sold out. Scalpers for example sell tickets given to people who do not use them (a regular practice in China is to give tickets to events as a gift to customers). Last year everyone anticipated a sold out event, and because of that all tickets were bought in advance. However, many of my friends are now waiting for tickets from scalpers to become available.

Another reason for the lower sales are the increased prices for the tickets. The F1 organization probably thought that because of a sold-out event last year they could raise prices. But because it is not a novelty anymore, many people are not willing to pay prices of sometimes several thousand yuan for a ticket. The fact that this is the last race of the season, and Alonso has been crowned champion already, also does not help.

At least some things will be improved in comparison to last year. Shuttle buses are for free this year for example. But more important, they are able to drive around the perimeter of the stands. Last year I had to walk for at least 45 minutes to get to my stand, which was on the exact other side of the track. I don’t mind, but not everybody likes to walk so far.

What most likely will still be the same is the long wait for buses to get back to the city, and the traffic jams after the race is over. Last year I was lucky to have an invitiation for the after-party at the Volkswagen test track (close to the F1 circuit), so I avoided this. But friends told me it took them hours to get on a bus and get back to downtown Shanghai.

Hotmail account deleted

Just checked my hotmail account, and what happens: I get a message that I have not logged on for 90 days so all my mails are deleted. However, this is not true, the last time I checked was indeed a while ago (probably just before my marriage, today exactly 1 month ago), but not 90 days. The strangest thing is that hotmail is suddenly in Dutch instead of English, although I did not change any settings. I hardly ever used hotmail anymore, because it is slow in China and much better web based mail-services have emerged. But I saved several emails from the past 9 years in there, and they are all gone now. Great…

Thanks Microsoft, this is how you loose a customer.

Yahoo! goes podcasting

Yahoo started its own podcasting site a few hours ago (http://podcasts.yahoo.com). Although this will be a competitor for Toodou.com, I am actually glad to see this, because more people will become familiar with podcasting. In the end Toodou will benefit from this. Furthermore, Yahoo focuses only on audio, and Toodou is doing both audio and video (video is bigger than audio, it’s about 60:40 right now). Toodou also takes it a step further by building a community around it where you can rate and comment on the podcasts.

I tried out the new site and it works pretty good. Podcasts are searchable by tags (like Toodou), and you can add additional tags as a user. When you subscribe to your first podcast you need to download a small file that will automatically put your podcasts in your preferred program. I use iTunes for my audio podcasts, and it worked perfect. The search for podcasts also worked very well, and you get to choose between series or episodes. I noticed and downloaded an interesting podcast series for people who want to learn Chinese (search on ‘chinese’), chinesepod.com. Very basic, but fun to listen to if you want to learn to speak Mandarin Chinese (and for free). This is the kind of program that will make podcasting big!

National Holiday-lag

I realize it is a Sunday night now, but for me it feels like the middle of the week. Not a jetlag but a National Holiday-lag. Why? This weekend was a working weekend in China. Each of the 3 official holidays (Spring Festival, May 1, and October 1) give Chinese 5 days off in a row. But in order to compensate that people have to work either the weekend before or after the vacation. This time it was the weekend after the holiday, so I spent the weekend in my office. Got lots of work done, as not many emails or phone calls came in, I suspect that most people took an additional two days off. The good thing is that I caught up with all my emails and other things that were waiting for me after my honeymoon. Also managed to upload all pictures from my wedding to www.flickr.com/groups/chinawedding (many people sent me there pictures, thanks!), and my honeymoon pictures to www.flickr.com/photos/chijs.