Two recent events in the world of online video have me wondering lately: Is China ready for an onslaught of Stephen Colbert, The Real World and Chad Vader? Or will the Chinese answer the potential invasion of American amateur video and pop-reality TV with Lightsaber Kids and Capitalist Roader Rules of their own?

Last week, Google made a much-publicized purchase of YouTube, making three Silicon Valley techies rather wealthy overnight (one of them wealthier, as he helped start PayPal, which eBay snagged).

Then a few days ago, Viacom announced a deal to distribute MTV in China through Baidu, the Middle Kingdom’s home-grown search engine. The deal gives the channel that long ago stopped saying “It’s about the music” a shot at 123 million Internet users over here. MTV has a similar deal with Google, which could mean a lot more now that the super searcher has YouTube in its pocket, but I’ll get to that in a moment.

Keep in mind, Baidu still trumps both Google and Yahoo in China, getting about 250 million hits a day. It also plays by Beijing’s rules, happily blocking material deemed “inapprinappropriate” for the fragile eyes, ears and minds of Chinese netizens. This might be the winning strategy, as the Times writes:

Analysts, who often insist that internet users in China is far more interested in entertainment rather than search or information, say the alliance shows some promise, particularly because China lacks high quality television programming.

“It sets a good example in the industry,” says Hu Zhengrong, a professor at the Communication University of China in Beijing. “Most of the products that Chinese traditional media provide are only used once. They don’t generate any circulation value. The Chinese media need to explore more channels.”

But MTV officials say they are teaming up with an extraordinary partner in Baidu, which is the country’s fastest growing web site and is populated by search and entertainment sites as well as blogs.

As for GooTube, the effects of last week’s merger remain to be sorted out.

Google Video remains unavailable here (if you’re not in China, you can watch this), whether for technical or political reasons, I’m not sure. YouTube, on the other hand, is perfectly accessible. Google, like Yahoo and Microsoft, has made concessions to operate in China. I’m not aware of any such dealings with YouTube. Will that change now that the purse strings are now tied to Mountain View?

What happens when Free Tibet protesters put up video of one of their little stunts? Perhaps someone has video of that incident in Tiananmen Square 17 years ago. There’s likely some b-roll floating around of at least a few of the 87,000 public demonstrations from last year (those are just the avowed ones).

All of this is probably on YouTube now. I haven’t done all the searches. But Google has baggage that its latest acquisition didn’t. The question is, how many will still be there when Google takes over?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 18th, 2006 at 11:38 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.