Video Shootout Part 3 – SINA Video Activities
In the last couple of earning conferences, SINA talked a little about their video activities. But they definitely didn’t sound as passionate as SOHU’s management. Let’s see how much effort has SINA put into their video activities.
The following is the main page of sina, www.sina.com.cn:
Right away, I am able to tell there are a lot of video programming on SINA’s site. On the left hand side, there some sample programming on SINA’s broadband programming. On the right hand side, it is some news with video in them.
Sina’s main page is similar to SOHU’s in that it has many news items, probably in the thousands. Let’s scroll down the main page to the entertainment section of the main page:
As you can see, there are a lot of items with embedded videos.
Most other sections don’t have as many video footages. But as a rough guess, I would say that SINA has probably 3 to 4 times as many stories with embedded video.
Since I had looked at the sports section of NTES and SOHU, let’s do the same for SINA. The following is the main sports page
On the right hand side, it has the TV schedules for some sports matches. On the upper left hand side, there is a button called Sports Broadband page, let’s click on that and the main Sports Broadband page appears
It is clear that when SINA say broadband, it means video. Every stories in this page has video contents in them. On the right hand side, it plays a sports match.
On the top, there is a row of video channels. They are England Soccer, Italian Soccer, Europe Soccer, Goal TV, ESPN, Tennis, Golf, F1, and Others. I believe these are some of the premier contents they licensed from the third parties (for example, European soccer leagues, etc.)
On the upper left part, there is a button called SinaTV, lets click on that and SinaTV page comes up
It is clear SinaTV is the TV channel that has Sina’s original contents. The type of programs are movies, talk shows, etc. It is similar to SOHU’s V channel. It uses Sina’s peer-to-peer programs. Therefore, it won’t require much hardware and bandwidth resource even if there are millions of viewers watching.
On the top of the page, there are a row of buttons that indicated different channels. It has CCTV, and Phoenix TV.
Finally, lets go to Sina’s new YouTube-like service, blog video: http://v.blog.sina.com.cn/
The set up is very similar to youtube. When you click on a link, the video for that link pop up. This is strictly user generated.
Now, we are able to make several observations:
1. Sina has the most video contents. There are probably 3 to 4 times more stories with embedded video than Sohu and 10 to 20 times than that of Ntes.
2. Sina signed many license deals with many 1st tier contents providers such as ESPN, CCTV, PhoenixTV,
3. These license would surely increase the cost of contents (unless they are profit sharing). But they also allows Sina to get many embedded video for the stories.
4. These embedded video takes a lot of resources and bandwidths because they are not peer-to-peer.
5. Sina does have a peer-to-peer TV channel called SinaTV. Most of the shows are existing TV shows or movies. The percentage of the original contents are not as high as that of Sohu.
6. Sina also have other TV channels like ESPN, CCTV, Phoenix TV. Most of the contents are broadcasted through embedded video. Sina probably spend a lot of money on buying the contents, and on hardware and bandwidth to distribute these contents.
7. Very little advertising on these video contents.
8. Unlike youtube that is a stand alone service, Sina’s blog video is part of Sina’s blog service.
9. Sina is getting a lot of celebrities to generate popular blog videos. I am pretty sure it cost Sina money to have these celebrities under contract.
10. Sina is going to integrate its instant messaging service, UC, with the blog video. Therefore, Sina is going to have its youtube, blog, and instant messaging all integrated into one service. This may have the wonderful side effect of making UC more competitive against Tencent’s QQ.
11. There is very little ads in Sina’s blogs and blog videos.
In part4 and 5, I will have a brief descriptions on other competitors. Part 6 is the conclusion.
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