Image source @ Visual China
Text | The Internet refers to the north, the author | Daniel, Editor, | Pu Fan
On February 9, Douyin's official account in today's headlines released a message in response to the previous controversy over the content of "Chosin Lake" on Douyin.
Douyin official verification said that the "Changjin Lake" related content appearing on the platform is the content launched by the producer Bona Pictures and Douyin, and the total length of the video is only six minutes, and the material is also from relevant historical materials and promotional films, and because the playback volume is extremely high, the producer and the platform guests and hosts are happy.
This is not the first time that Douyin has encountered the iron fist of the long video platform, in the early days, Tencent Video had sued Douyin, asking it to remove all the content related to the hit drama "Sweeping Black Storm", but Douyin said that this is also a cooperative promotion project between the publisher of the series and Douyin.
Moving forward, in April last year, the long video website came up with the posture of six major factions besieging the bright top, and 17 film and television industry associations, 54 film and television companies, and 5 video platforms once again jointly released the "Proposal" for the protection of film and television copyrights.
The source of this matter comes from the popular drama "Little Shede" at that time, many short video users released multiple short videos taken from TV series on the platform, "collection style" chase drama, and many users who mainly used film and television commentary, using the materials in the play, plus their own commentary, quickly spoiled the audience. Some explanatory videos have reached 4-5 million views.
The main content of the "Proposal" of this siege campaign is to call on everyone to protect copyright and resist unauthorized film and television drama editing on short video platforms.
(Source: Tencent)
Although it looks grand, but netizens do not buy it, some people think that this is the Internet giant such as Tencent using the name of maintaining copyright to achieve monopoly, some people think that if there is no short video of the movie commentary for their own demining, they would rather not watch film and television dramas.
No matter how netizens express their position, from the timeline of nearly a year, the fierce battle between long videos and short videos will continue.
Long video platform for film and television drama editing and commentary is so grumpy understanding, from the perspective of Youku, Tencent, iQiyi and other famous traditional long video platforms: we have worked hard to buy the copyright of film and television dramas, but the short video platform to take as material for secondary creation, more infuriating is that many edited short video playback volume all the way red, even exceeded the copyright party's playback volume.
Moreover, the fragmented time utilization of short videos, concise and clear content attributes of strong stimulation, but also let more people lazy to watch the full episode, but on the short video platform to see a commentary even if the chase is finished, further causing the loss of users of the copyright owner, a vicious circle.
In fact, the logic of long video platforms such as Youaiteng on the grounds of copyright seems to be true, however, from the results, the long video platform for short videos has not improved their own situation, Youaiteng is still in a state of loss, and iQiyi broke the news of layoffs of 40% at the end of last year.
What is the dilemma of long video platforms?
From barbaric growth to copyright defender
The first decade of the 21st century was a decade in which the traditional media was still alive and the new media was full of vitality.
At that time, television was still the bearer of audio-visual aspects, although Tudou and Youku were established around 2005, but at that time, the number of Netizens in China was less than one-fifth of the national population, and Tudou's slogan "Everyone is the director of life" sounded with the temperament of a niche literary youth.
Compared with the TV at that time, the advantage of online video is that it has independent choice, which one you want to see, how long you want to watch how long, so many video websites have also begun to grow wildly.
If you still have a memory of the video sites of that era, then you will know that there was no copyright protection at that time, many American dramas, British dramas are searched at will, even the full collection of copyright rogue Disney movies can be found on video websites such as Youku, it is said that foreign filmmakers have found domestic video sites, but the website said that those episodes are uploaded by "enthusiastic users", and we are also defenseless.
It can be seen that today's domestic long video websites almost did not take copyright seriously at the beginning.
After entering the 2010s, the Internet environment became more and more mature, and the method of openly playing pirated copies to attract users was obviously no longer suitable for video sites, so in 2011, the copyright war began to be staged, but the three giants at that time were not Youaiteng, but Youku, Tudou and Sohu.
(Internet video industry pattern in 2011)
The dispute between the three giants has made the copyright fee go all the way up, and the price of a single episode of the 2011 blockbuster drama "The Biography of Zhen Huan" reached 300,000, which caused a wave of surprise from the media, but if the media knows the price of a single episode after a few years, I am afraid that I will be shocked to drop my jaw.
In the following years, the pattern of video websites was turned upside down, Youku and Tudou merged, Sohu fell behind for various reasons, and Baidu-backed iQiyi and Tencent Video, a subsidiary of Tencent, formed a new three-point world with Youku.
In 2014, with the opening of the era of traffic stars, a large amount of capital poured into the film and television industry, and the industry began a period of deformed competition, with a large number of fans, but actors with poor acting skills poured into the industry, because TV dramas generally sell money according to the number of episodes, so in order to make more money, there is no limit to the number of long episodes, resulting in water injection dramas.
The video website that urgently needs traffic stars to increase the number of broadcasts has also spared no expense, introducing film and television dramas, and the copyright cost of a single episode of "Ruyi Chuan" in 2017 has reached 9 million, and the average single episode copyright fee of that year has increased by 6,000 times compared with 2006.
Although the market at that time seemed to be full of flowers, because of the poor quality of the works, most viewers had a long memory after being deceived many times, and the major video platforms involved in the copyright war were seriously injured.
In 2018, the state successively introduced policies to control the chaos in the film and television industry, and slowly, the sky-high copyright began to be controlled, and long video websites gradually shifted from zero-sum games to cooperative competition, such as the use of the "head episode replacement" strategy, according to the quality, user preferences, volume and other multiple factors to consider, from solo broadcast to spelling.
In addition, each platform has also launched some high-quality original variety shows and dramas according to its own tonality.
But despite this, the excessive burning of money in the past few years cannot be returned in a short period of time, so long video sites are still in a state of loss.
Judging from the development of long video in the past ten years, they have never been a moral model for copyright protection, starting by relying on the original accumulation of pirated resources to oppose "excessive copyright protection", after copyright protection has gradually been paid attention to, several long video platforms have bought out upstream copyrights with their own capital advantages, with the intention of creating a monopoly. Today's losses also have a lot to do with the former bad money expelling good money.
The inability to make a profit is more like improper operation and self-inflicted, and it is obviously unfair to sprinkle the fire on the short video platform.
It's not easy to make a profit
In addition to the historical shortcomings, the profit model of the long video platform has also been criticized.
The profit model of youaiteng three is very single, one hand collects advertisers' advertisements, the other hand collects membership fees, and a very important privilege of members is: free advertising.
This also makes this charging model fall into a very strange situation: advertisers pay to expose their brands, and members pay to keep their brands from being exposed.
Around 2019, several major video platforms carried out a highly controversial riot operation in order to increase revenue - members advanced on demand, that is, members want to watch the latest updated episodes, need to pay an additional fee of 3 yuan per episode.
Although this kind of "VIP in P" routine has greatly increased revenue in a short period of time on a certain series, it has attracted a wave of bad reviews, and the China Consumer Association has posted on the official website, hoping that the video website will "have fewer routines and more sincerity".
In 2020, the Beijing Internet Court pronounced a judgment on the case of "Qing Yu Nian" advanced on demand, finding that this secondary consumption constituted a breach of contract.
If Chinese audiences, who are increasingly attaching importance to copyright, are happy to charge members in order to support genuine, then "genuine fees, pirate enjoyment" has made many people even more disappointed in long-form video websites.
If you carefully compare the length of the movie on several parent video websites with the length given by the official, you will find that the video platform has deleted and changed almost all foreign language films and even old Hong Kong films, and I revisited the "Golden Jade Mantang" starring Zhang Guorong and Yuan Yongyi on Youku during the Spring Festival, and deleted three minutes of content in the middle, resulting in the beginning and end of the paragraph being very abrupt.
More ridiculous than the scissor hand is to change the ending without authorization, before the Spring Festival, someone found that the classic movie "Fight Club" in 1999 was actually added a subtitle on Tencent Video, changing the ending to another direction, and one of Nicolas Cage's masterpieces, "The King of War", was not spared.
The ending of this change not only spread to the extranet, triggering onlookers, but also made many people question the film and television quality of long video websites, after all, no one wants to pay for food, eat a short meal.
Short videos are never the enemy
If the plan of the long video website in the past is: first use resources to retain users, wait for users to reach a certain scale, cultivate their payment habits, and then complete the harvest.
Then the rise of the short video platform, it completely disrupted this plan, when the Tudou network was first established, the slogan shouted out was "everyone is the director of life", ten years later, Tudou has yesterday yellow flowers, but the black humor is that this slogan is realized by the short video platform.
The popularity of the mobile Internet allows grassroots people to achieve "15 minutes of fame", a smart phone can shoot a small drama of tens of seconds, and its labor cost, money cost and time cost are incomparable to long video platforms.
Just as the right to speak on TELEVISION was ceded to the Internet, the re-transfer of discourse power from elite to grassroots quickly brought huge traffic to short video sites.
Jiamusi's fourth elder, Zhu Yidan (and Zhang Ce, who later ran away and devoted himself to novella videos), Zhang Jintiao, and other talented people who were not film and television professionals were given the opportunity to show themselves, and they who turned out to be couriers, company owners, and employees quickly gained huge fans.
Including the short video of film criticism and drama review mentioned at the beginning, will "X minutes to watch a movie" really become the biggest culprit of "box office" and "ratings"? This is obviously an inverted question, and even its existence complements the film and television industry to a certain extent, which is a result of the market's active choice:
In today's faster and faster pace of life, attention competition is becoming more and more fierce today, up to half an hour of video viewing for many people is a more luxurious time allocation, and the quality of film and television dramas is uneven, resulting in many viewers in watching a film do not know how the quality is, if you wait to see half of it to find that it is a bad film, wasted time will bring people a strong sense of frustration, so the film commentary also plays a role in screening.
There are many people who have their own trust in the creator of the film commentary, and under his recommendation, they determine whether they have completed the viewing of the whole film, which is also the embodiment of data democratization to some extent.
For example, Gu Amo in Taiwan once swept Chinese the Internet with light and humorous movie commentary, and the official media "Zhengzhou Evening News" once had such an affirmation: When you don't have time to watch a movie, watch Gu Amo's short film, with witty commentary and video editing, you can understand the outline of a movie in a few minutes, and you can also accurately get to the laughter point and groove, which is much easier than watching film reviews.
Of course, in 2018, five film and television companies, including Disney, sued Gu Amo in court, and finally Gu Amo was founded to be infringing.
Therefore, after that, the short video platform also attaches great importance to the boundary between infringement and secondary creation, and in the past three months alone, a head short video platform has removed more than 3.38 million film and television infringing videos and banned 11,039 film and television infringing accounts.
At the same time, the platform also said that the "two creations" content based on film and television have the innovation and contribution of users, and they are also the expression of users' true emotions. "Two innovations" are new things that should be encouraged and supported. Filmmakers, users, and creators all have needs, and they should not beat the user's creation to death under the guise of maintaining copyright.
In short, the possibility of long videos wanting to grab the cake with short videos through copyright is getting smaller and smaller, and the overall formalization of the short video industry has become an irreversible trend.
epilogue
From the above article, it seems that the historical detours, the obstruction of profitability and the encirclement and suppression of short videos, the future of long video platforms seems to be slightly pessimistic.
But as long as Chinese there is still a need to watch film and television dramas, long videos still have opportunities, and the "Hidden Corners", "Silent Truth" and "Beginning" of the recent two years of fire show the potential of the market.
Moreover, in this era when the short video market is getting bigger and bigger, there are still some long video websites abroad that are soaring, and although the successful experience of foreign counterparts cannot be copied, it still has great reference significance.
Netflix, which once surpassed Disney in market capitalization in 2018 and became the world's largest media, is a good example. Although "personalized demand", "content is king" and "mining the market to be tapped" are the slogans of all content platforms, very few have really done it, and Netflix, which has a pure user payment system, has done it.
For example, they will set the presentation of the series according to the audience preferences of different countries and regions (the Japanese like special effects subtitles, the Poles like to add narration); they are willing to spend money on the high-quality drama while respecting the creators, such as not using the amount of broadcast to pressure the creators, in order not to destroy the narrative structure, it is better to finish in one breath; and for example, to take the lead in providing visually impaired people with a Netflix that can be listened to.
In 2021, Netflix's net profit reached $5.116 billion.
Therefore, if the long video platform wants to break through, instead of focusing on the protection of the rights of short videos, it is better to examine its own problems in order to kill a bloody road.