Youku Tudou yesterday announced a change in organizational structure designed to foster speed, flexibility, innovation and strategy-focused execution as China’s Internet television leader.
Under the new structure, Youku.com and Tudou.com will exist as separate business units, with Wei Ming heading up Youku.com and Yang Weidong at the helm of Tudou.com. This division of labor allows each site to maintain the distinctive brands that made them successful with the Group providing Bus with shared infrastructure and services.
On the personnel side, Youku Tudou also announced several key promotions: Xiangyang Zhu will serve as Chief Content Officer, while Yawei Dong becomes the Chief Marketing Officer, and Huilong Zhu is now Senior Vice President.
Chairman of the Board for Youku Tudou Inc. Victor Koo said, “Since the successful August 2012 merger, Youku Tudou has been in a period of integration and gathering strength. Now, we’re ready to enter a new phase: moving forward as a nimble organization to relentlessly pursue our mission. These new changes will help us get the most out of our extremely talented team as we continue to innovate and lead the way for internet companies in China.”

Let’s face it: you already spend so much time curled up on the couch watching Youku that it feels less like a website and more like a friend. (A friend with an impossibly great collection of TV and movies, but you get the idea). Now you can WeChat with Youku the same way you chat with your, um, human friends. Simply send a chat to Youku’s account with the title of a movie or TV show, and you’ll receive a link to that video. Stream it instantly, or save it to watch at your convenience. You and Youku’s 300 million viewers now have our massive library of content literally at your fingertips.

There’s other reasons to WeChat with Youku. We’ll keep up our end of the conversation by sending you links to the newest, most popular content, and even delivering cinema coupons. It’s all part of our overall mission: to become China’s go-to source for high-quality video content.

Yes, Youku and Tudou just recently connected user accounts, allowing users of either site to log into the other with their existing account information. The account connectivity marks the companies’ first move to integrate their services since announcing their merger on March 12.

Youku has actively sought to promote interoperability with other services. In May 2011, Youku announced Youku Link, a cross-platform synchronization service allowing users to share social aspects of the Youku experience – including comments and favorite videos – across outside social platforms like Sina Weibo, Renren, and Tencent QZone. Other social initiatives have included Youku Classroom, which adds the power of Sina Weibo’s microblogging platform and Dict.cn’s English-Chinese dictionary to educational videos hosted on Youku’s servers, and Youku Music Box, an intelligent, socially aware music video player.

Behold Sister Cake, an employee in a bakery in downtown Hefei, Anhui Province:

Commenters on the video have pointed out that Sister Cake isn’t just counting the cakes: they’re sold by weight — that is, customers will come in and ask for five kuai’s worth of cakes — so she’s actually estimating how much the cakes weigh while she zips them into the bag. Other commenters have suggested that she might turn a better profit by applying her “skilled hands” to “other things.” Still others have expressed their amazement through Chinese proverbs — 熟能生巧 (basically, “practice makes perfect”) being the most common.

Youku has a new Hollywood films channel. Finally, a little taste of Netflix here in China!

When I say little, I do mean little — at least for the moment. The channel collects Hollywood films from a variety of genres that can be streamed in China, but the selection is a bit thin at the moment, comprising just over 2,000 titles. Some are free, and some cost a nominal fee. The collection ranges from top-flight hits (Juno, The Karate Kid, Twilight) all the way to films that are doing their best to imitate China’s shanzhai spirit (Titanic II, Allan Quartermain and the Temple of Skulls, Alien vs. Hunter). The latter may not really scream “Hollywood” to Americans, but they are from the US, and they’re certainly Hollywood-inspired, even if they aren’t exactly A-list.

It’s nice to be able to watch Inception at a moment’s notice — probably most Youku users are more excited about that than Alien vs Hunter — but it’s the bad films that make me feel at home. I’ve been something of a bad film connoisseur since I saw the straight-to-VHS slasher Uncle Sam, and I’m probably one of the few people who has gotten some enjoyment out of the latter half of M. Night Shyamalan’s career. But whether you prefer good films or, uh, “alternative” films, there are some options.

The channel is definitely worth checking out, but since I’m sure you’re curious, I’ll settle one mystery for you right here. What did Youku users think about the “sequel” to Titanic, one of the most beloved movies of all time? Titantic II — which has no actual connection to the original Titanic — has been viewed over 15,000 times already and is rated 4.7/10. That’s not exactly a great rating; on the other hand, it’s a higher than the Rotten Tomatoes rating so apparently Chinese viewers are a bit more forgiving than critical Western audiences. Perhaps this and other B-movies will find a second market here in China.

Check out Titanic II below, or click through to browse the Hollywood channel for something slightly less budget.

Zhang Yadong is a music producer who is quite famous in China. Even if you’ve never heard of him, you’ve almost certainly heard some of his creations. He’s the man behind much of the music of Faye Wong, Karen Mok, and a number of other A-listers; he’s also a talented singer who has released a significant amount of original material.

As you’ll learn in the video, Zhang was a bit rebellious in his youth. He smoked — even holding smoking contests with his friends and inhaling so much that he passed out — and got kicked out of school repeatedly. At 13, he left home and put it all on the line in Beijing, passing out cassettes to record labels in hopes of scoring a deal. It worked out, and now he’s one of the best known — and more important, most respected — names in the Chinese music industry.

Video Link

In this video, we see a calmer, more reflective side of Zhang; an older man who has accomplished his goals looking back on his rebellious past. He’s tired of that story, he says, ready to move on to new things. He’s traveled to the top of the music industry and now he’s even made a short film about love, commitment, and the meaning of happiness for Youku’s new Youku Original short film series, “One Step Away.”

Zhang is one of six creative stars from professions other than film who are taking a dive into film production, and his short film will premiere on Youku later this summer.

It looks like Youku users are just as excited for Zhang’s short film as we are, because this bio has been viewed nearly a million times. Together, the six directors’ bios have gotten nearly 9 million views so far. Keep an eye out for the films themselves, which are coming very soon!

Today marks Youku’s fifth anniversary. In his remarks on the occasion, CEO Victor Koo looked back at the emergence of online television in China, and reflected over the steps Youku took along its rise to to the top of the new industry. In addition to the company’s development of partnerships with film and television production and distribution companies, Koo highlighted Youku’s moves to foster paike (video bloggers) and promote grassroots talents and up-and-coming young directors as crucial elements in making Youku the company it is today.

Mr. Koo also touched upon Youku’s goal for the next five years, which include:

• Continued improvements to the Youku user experience. Youku will not only work to improve all aspects of its offerings, from user-facing systems to back-end systems, but will also move beyond being a simple conduit for content by developing new products that will further personalize the user experience and drive user engagement, whether on traditional computers, tablets, or mobile terminals.
• Creating mutually beneficial partnerships with television and film organizations. Youku already enjoys productive partnerships with a number of studios, production companies, and distributors, and will seek to build its library of content by expanding these partnerships in the future.
• Raising brand recognition. Rather than relying on traditional methods like advertising campaigns, Youku will make itself a ubiquitous part of the Chinese internet experience, no matter what platform netizens use or what devices they use to get online.

Some of the milestones Mr. Koo cited in his look back at Youku’s growth:
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This Tuesday and Wednesday, 9.33 million high school students across China sat for the 高考 gaokao — the super-stressful national college entrance examination that will determine their futures in a way that the SAT and AP exams (no matter what your high-school guidance counselor may have told you) never could. (For those keeping track at home, the official name of the exam is the 中华人民共和国普通高等学校招生全国统一考试 — the “National Higher Education Entrance Examination” — but everyone just calls it the gaokao.) The gaokao is the focus of years of schooling, cram classes, and obsessive test preparation; it is the motivation driving the development of increasingly high-tech cheating equipment; it is no fun at all for anybody. (If you’re interested in reading more about the gaokao, Jiang Xueqin had an excellent piece about it earlier this week, “The Sad Truth of China’s Education.”)

One of today’s top videos on Youku is of students at the #5 High School in Xiangfan, Hubei province shredding their textbooks into confetti and showering the schoolyard with them — a tradition at the school, according to the video description. Being a bibliophile, I hate to see books damaged — but I have to admit, it’s pretty hard to blame them:

(A couple of years ago, Steven Lin posted a video of students in Hanzhong, Shaanxi province ripping up their textbooks after the exam. Great minds think alike, apparently.)

Today in “eat the rich” news, we have a video of an argument between the driver of a BMW and the driver of a cheap Karry minivan. Before the start of the video, we are told, the BMW shot out the gate of a residential compound and scraped the Karry, which had been parked outside. The driver of the Karry got out of her van and walked over to the BMW, whose driver stayed in the car talking on the phone for more than 15 minutes before getting out. The paike who shot this apparently just happened upon the scene and started recording in an attempt to pressure the BMW driver into paying for the damage. As you can see, he mainly had the effect of making her even more annoyed — she tells him to stop filming several times — and in the end, she shouted “Here’s your money!” and chucked a wad of RMB 100 notes in the face of the Karry driver.

This was one of the most watched videos last week. Videos showing clashes between the haves and the have-nots of Chinese society are invariably popular with netizens, who look at things like the famous Li Gang hit-and-run case, the video of a girl being picked up from college by helicopter that went viral earlier this year, and any number of other videos on the theme of “rich people behaving badly,” and conclude that the wealthy and connected are held to a different standard of conduct.

Then again, there are reasons to be suspicious of this video. A couple commenters say the whole thing was scripted, and when you go back and watch it again, it seems almost too perfect — nearly tailor-made to inspire class rage in Chinese internet users. Consider the almost perfect symmetry of it: the expensively dressed blonde in her BMW against the humbly dressed woman (of approximately the same age) in her junkbox Karry; the loud anger of BMW Woman next to the quiet unhappiness of Karry Girl. And BMW Woman’s final insult, taken straight from the bad-guy playbook of every Hong Kong movie ever, of throwing a fistful of money into the poor woman’s face, and then the closing shot of Karry Girl crying at her steering wheel. It’s a perfect little vignette, and the consensus among viewers seems to be that if it’s not true, then it should be.

Then again, if it’s a viral ad, who is it advertising? What’s the subtext? “BMW: the preferred car of unpleasant nouveau-riche mistresses?” “Karry: only worth it if a rich person runs into you?”