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The solution to the problem in the long video may be wrong
Written by Zou Shan
Editor/Smart
"Abridged version of Friends is better not to watch."
Recently, the aiyoutengduo parent video platform jointly launched "Friends" set off a hot discussion, in addition to the netizens' ridicule and dissatisfaction with the deletion, which seems to mark the beginning of another round of IP copyright competition for domestic video websites.
Copyright, in recent years, can be described as making long video platforms love and hate, love the interests and traffic behind it, and hate its fierce competition. One background is that the growth rate of long video platforms has slowed down, and there is even a possibility of decline, and the competition for existing IP has become the current trend.
The other side of the copyright issue is the dispute over long and short videos that was once put on the table. Especially since April last year, long video platforms led by iQiyi have begun to join forces to besiege short videos and concentrate firepower on secondary creations.
This tug-of-war has been going on for a long time, and the attitude of long video platforms is becoming more and more drunk and not drunk - combined with the impact of short videos on long videos, as well as the dilemma of long videos themselves, long videos that take the initiative seem to be competing for copyright, but in fact try to grab back lost audiences and find a way out of the predicament.
However, the solution of the long video may be wrong. After all, whether it is a profit dilemma, user loss or difficult to get out of the blockbuster, tracing back to the source, the problem is still in the development bottleneck of the long video platform itself and the industry's accumulated shortcomings.
A double-standard game, it is difficult to escape the prisoner's dilemma
An important reason why the copyright dispute over long and short videos is constantly questioned is that in the matter of copyright protection, long video platforms appear to be somewhat "double standard".
The recent incident is that after the popularity of "Squid Game" in 2021, iQiyi and Youku have not resisted the temptation of "traffic" and tried to rub a wave of heat. However, suffering from no copyright, can only play the edge ball to enter, the result is not only not profitable, but also questioned by users.
Among them, there is Youku, which is suspected of "plagiarism", and its public new variety poster uses obvious "Squid Game" symbols and tones - triangles, circles, squares, and the keywords of "childhood game", "strong plot", "intellectual and physical challenge", it is difficult not to think of "Squid Game".
After the online plot commentary and marked "original" iQiyi, searched for "Squid Game" on iQiyi and saw tens of thousands of related videos. Among them, ""Squid Game" Korean Drama Full Episode Quick Look", "Squid Game" Suspense Drama" and other highly confusing videos, not only indicate "original", but also blur the keyword "commentary", often giving users an illusion of "copyrighted full set of positive films", in fact, they are all video commentary.
This year, Aiyouteng has repeatedly denounced short video platforms such as Douyin, Station B, and Kuaishou, and determined that the unauthorized cutting, handling, speed watching, and compilation of videos are all infringing acts. I didn't think that in the face of the huge traffic pool, the long video platform was still shouting copyright protection one second ago, and the next second it rubbed the heat for secondary creation, which was somewhat "punching the face".
In fact, looking back at history, it is not difficult to find that the "double standard" of long video platforms has long been traced.
Within the long video industry, there have been many copyright disputes before.
Among them, the zinc scale search found that according to the public information of Aiqicha, iQiyi has also been involved in the infringement crisis many times. From 2020 to 2021, LeEco has repeatedly sued iQIYI for infringing on the right to disseminate works on the Internet. According to the public civil judgment, LeTV claimed that the defendant iQIYI Company provided the public with online broadcast services for the works involved in the case on its iQIYI website and video software without permission, infringing the plaintiff LeTV's right to disseminate information networks, including "Thirty Years Old, Hello", "Shanghai Mist", "City of Warriors" and "Food and Pregnancy".
(Image source: Aiqicha)
In the face of infringement challenges, iQIYI has repeatedly argued that the work is uploaded by the user and the defendant is the network service provider, and the "safe harbor principle" should be applied.
On the one hand, for their own interests, they call for advocating the expansion of "fair use" and statutory licenses in the Internet field, avoid excessive copyright protection to restrict the spread and bring unfair competition, on the other hand, they attack the secondary creation of short video platforms, and call for strengthening copyright protection, long video platforms still seem to stay in a self-interested competitive thinking, rather than really starting from the overall situation of the industry copyright awareness.
In addition, as we all know, in the era when various video websites mainly purchased European and American film and television dramas and Japanese animations, the exclusive screening rights of Youku, Tencent Video, iQiyi, and LeTV were sold by the purchasing departments of Youku, Tencent Video, iQiyi, and LeTV, which was the norm, and the result was that no one could make money, and it became a large player that was posted to the original author and free to the user.
In the white-hot stage of competition for long video platforms, major platforms have also relied on capital power for a long time to purchase film and television IP in a large area, and block IP copyright, development rights, and use rights, monopolizing the interest space of IP, which not only makes the long video platform itself fall into the dilemma of not being able to make ends meet, but also has a certain impact on the rights and interests of creators. But at present, in the face of short video creators, long video platforms have also begun to advocate "recovering" copyright profits, which seems to be somewhat unfair.
After all, the issue of secondary creation infringement has long been a dilemma in the practice of rights protection, and long and short video platforms have their own reasons. When the position of the long video platform on the copyright issue continues to waver, and the attitude is repeatedly "double standard", then the long-lasting long-term dispute over long and short videos is easy to just stay in the meaningless war of words and fall into the prisoner's dilemma - for their own interests, abandoning common interests, and eventually everyone's interests are damaged, ultimately leading to a lose-lose situation, and may even affect the interests of many creators and users.
Why is the muzzle aimed at short videos?
Since their own position is always untenable, why do long video platforms still compete so copyright issues, and the muzzle of the gun is aimed at short videos?
Perhaps the more important reason is that the long video platform has been suffering from short videos for a long time. In recent years, the strength of short video platforms has become increasingly strong, the number of users and viewing time has increased, and at the same time, the strength of advertising and profitability has also increased significantly, which has caused a lot of pressure on long videos.
It is more intuitive to look at the specific data. According to the "China Mobile Internet Autumn Report" released by QuestMobile, in September 2021, the overall monthly active user scale of short video APP reached 925 million, exceeding the 903 million online video APP.
In terms of user time, the "2021 China Online Audiovisual Development Research Report" shows that the average single-day use time of short videos is increasing year by year, reaching 125 minutes in 2021. The average daily use time of long videos is 98 minutes.
As for advertising revenue, the financial report shows that iQiyi's advertising revenue has dropped from 9.3 billion yuan in 2018 to 6.8 billion yuan in 2020. In the same period, the advertising revenue of the short video industry increased by nearly 30%. According to the "2020 China Online Advertising Market Annual Insight Report" released by iResearch in July 2020, 51.7% of advertisers pay the most attention to short video marketing among the online media marketing methods that advertisers pay the most attention to, while only 16.5% choose long video marketing.
On the other hand, the short video platform has opened up another huge potential market for the video industry in publicity and marketing, providing an incremental idea for the industry as a whole, after all, the excellent erchuang video is equivalent to the promotional film of the film and drama synthesis. As Wang Xiaoqi Fire, the owner of B station UP, once explained in an interview with the Observer Network, "The Silent Truth" and "The Hidden Corner" produced by iQiyi were solid because of the solid plot, and the edited video used love to generate electricity through Amway to drive the audience to watch the drama on the platform; and episodes with different praises and criticisms like "Deer Ding" also brought a lot of heat because of the spit of the clip, although it was "black and red", but the topic and traffic were still used by the broadcast platform and the copyright party.
In a vote of 6381 people on a social platform, 5408 people chose to support the film and television clip number, giving the reason that "I will watch the original work after watching the second edit" and "the short videos I am interested in are almost all of this kind".
And this also stimulated the enthusiasm of creators, with the short video platform to give the living space and consumer market space reduction, many private editors even ushered in the spring of the career, in the vibrato, Kuaishou, B station and other short video platforms, the fans of more than one million, tens of millions of video bloggers are not a minority.
Even the 73 film and television institutions represented by Aiyou Tengmang also admitted in the joint statement that "rich and interesting short video works meet people's consumer demands for creating, displaying, sharing and using fragmented time to watch works." ”
But apparently, the rapid growth of short videos has triggered the uneasiness of long videos. After all, when short videos develop rapidly, long video platforms continue to fall into the storm of member price increases, advanced on-demand disputes, layoffs in winter, and historical problems that are difficult to solve after the burning money war.
Unable to take care of themselves, but also can not sit still, so the three opponents in the long video industry who used to fight each other seem to have a unanimous determination to the outside world, and can only focus on the attack point in the long-term gray area, it is difficult to clearly define the scope of the two-creation video copyright issue.
As for whether erchuang video constitutes infringement, Zhai Changbo, a partner lawyer at Beijing Weiheng (Shanghai) Law Firm, once said in an interview with Observer Network that in order to introduce and comment on a certain work or explain a certain problem, appropriately quoting other people's published works in the work belongs to the category of "fair use", so it is not necessarily an infringement to create a short video for the second time.
It is worth noting that in 2012, Chen Yidan, then the main founder and chief administrative officer of Tencent, vice chairman of the Copyright Association of China and a member of the Expert Committee for the Third Revision of the Copyright Law, publicly supported the principle of "safe haven", arguing that "copyright should take it as its mission to increase cultural vitality, not to protect or encourage vested commercial interests." Since then, experts and scholars such as Cong Lixian, a law professor at Beijing Foreign Chinese University, have also expressed their positions on media such as Tencent Research Institute, calling for the expansion of "fair use" and statutory permission in the Internet field to avoid excessive copyright protection restricting dissemination and bringing about unfair competition.
At present, the law does not have a clear limit on "appropriate citation", which needs to be judged in light of the specific situation, and in actual cases, this situation that needs to be specifically defined has become a gray area, providing space for long video platforms to reverse accountability for short video platforms: when they need to "prosper and develop", they advocate the expansion of fair use, and when trying to block the market, they turn to oppose the "safe harbor" principle and demand copyright control. Among them, the double standard is a bit obvious.
Long video, it is better to be outside than to be inside
It is not difficult to see that if you want to rely on the siege of short videos and seek a way out from short videos to "seek benefits", in fact, it cannot solve the essential problems of the long video industry, and may even be in the opposite direction and fruitless.
It is difficult to make a profit, which is a clichéd problem. The inability to continue to produce explosive models under high costs is not only difficult to make long videos profitable, but also one of the reasons for the large number of users to leave.
According to the financial report, in 2019, iQIYI's three major revenue sources of content distribution, online advertising and membership services totaled 25.25 billion yuan, and the content cost of that year was 22.25 billion yuan; in 2020, the total revenue of the three major revenues was 25.97 billion yuan, and the content cost of the year was 20.89 billion yuan; by 2021, iQIYI's revenue was 7.6 billion yuan, and the content cost expenditure was as high as 5.3 billion yuan.
Tencent's financial report also shows that in 2020, Tencent's content cost is 58.2 billion yuan, and Tencent Video accounts for a relatively large proportion. Last year, Sun Zhonghuai, vice president of Tencent and CEO of Penguin Films, also revealed that the content cost invested by Tencent Video in the past three years has exceeded 50 billion yuan, and it will still invest more than 100 billion yuan in the next three years.
So much is invested, but there are very few splashes. Even iQiyi's once highly acclaimed Mist Theater was also cold in 2021, and "Octagonal Pavilion Mystery Fog" as the opening work of the Fog Theater in 2021, the 5.7-point network rating was far less than expected, and the negative evaluation of the tide made this drama away from the ranks of blockbusters. As for the explosive variety shows such as "Idol Trainee", "Youth with You", and "China's New Rap", after being affected by the "milk pouring incident", the ace variety shows of iQiyi and Tencent have been suspended, and the path to obtain benefits from the fan economy has also been cut off.
In such a dilemma, the key to the profitability of long-form video platforms lies in the decreasing marginal cost: through the continuous expansion of membership, dilute their own costs in copyright acquisition. But the reality is that the growth of paid members on long-form video platforms has also fallen into a bottleneck.
Taking iQIYI as an example, according to iQIYI's first quarter 2021 financial report, its membership size in the first quarter was 105.3 million, compared with 118.9 million in the first quarter of 2020, not only did it not increase but even decreased by 13.6 million year-on-year.
How did it come to this? A series of "confusing" operations such as advanced on-demand and membership advertising previously launched by "iQiyi" have caused users to be dissatisfied and run away, and even directly called "eating ugly", which also had a certain impact on the data of long video platforms. The change in user time and membership size of each platform is the result of users "voting with their eyes" on how they obtain information. Although in 2021, the "iQiyi" were finally forced to announce the cancellation of advanced on-demand under pressure, whether the departed members can still come back has to put a question mark.
From this point of view, the solution to the dilemma faced by long videos may be wrong. Instead of concentrating firepower on the outside with an impure purpose, it is better to concentrate on "inside" and think about a more healthy and feasible path of development. In fact, only in this way can we truly solve the "urgent need" of the long video industry.
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