2 posts tagged “video”
Show us a picture that's worth a thousand words.
Submitted by sami711.
What makes YouTube so popular? Probably, the copyrighted materials - The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, The South Park, and other latest TV shows from all around the world. Though the content makers have asked YouTube to remove them over and over, users keep uploading the unauthorized videos day after day.
But in China, the we-will-be-the-next-YouTube websites can do much more than their American precedent. As a Chinese Web 2.0 entrepreneur tole me, "the foreign executives must be very 'jealous' of the copyright situation in mainland China." Copyrighted videos online? Who cares.
It's such a good news for the websites, and doubtless, better for the mainland Internet users.
Nowadays, open a Chinese video sharing website, type the title of your favorite show, click on the search button, and in less than one second, a result page with every single episode of the show will come up on your screen. Take ouou.com as an example, you can watch the the episodes which was premiered in America yesterday - 24, Prison Break, and teenagers' favorite sci-fi show in this season, Heroes.
What's more, there is no downloading process which belongs to the BitTorrent/KaZaA age, no Ads bothering you from the beginning to the end, and the most important, there is no language gap and cultural crash any more. In mainland, fans with extraordinary translating skills started making Chinese subtitles once they got the videos from the Internet. After the Episode 1, Season 2 of Prison Break came out in August 2006, the first video with Chinese subtitle was finished and uploaded in less than 7 hours.
And for some shows which require in-depth knowledges of American culture, there are footnotes among the subtitle. Especially in the show Studio 60 On the Sunset Strip, footnotes help Chinese audience understand the jokes about Hollywood history and American politicians. How can Chinese fans spell the weird names correctly? The embed English subtitles for HDTV programs were recorded and sent to the translating group in mainland.
So, even the networks import some famous shows, no one will watch them. Because the official versions always contain many translating mistakes, the terribly dubbed episodes always drive the viewers crazy, and the die-hard young fans have seen them online before. Last year, CCTV, the biggest governmental network imported Despaired Housewives, and the rates were incredibly low.
I don't think it's a Only-In-China affair. On the YouTube's Most Viewed page, you
can find some Japanese cartoon with English subtitles episodes from
time to time. They are also the fans' masterpieces. I read an article
about it on Fortunes magazine. But it said that if the official
versions are bought by American networks, the translating groups will
stop by themselves immediately.
In the winter of 2003, Microsoft held a contest to collect videos on innovation from the college students all around the world. The grand prize is a free trip to Brazil and US$5000 for the team, and the deadline is May 1st, 2004. (You can see a Windows logo at the end the opening animation. ^_^ )
My friend Martin forwarded the contest page to me, and without hesitating, we joined in. After several months' preparing, writing, filming, and editing, we finished and uploaded it to Microsoft's website on the last day of April, 2004.
What happened then? A big surprise. On May 1st, one Microsoft technical guy sent an email to me and told me that, the .rar file cannot be extracted correctly. And what's more, it was too late to upload it again.
Though the dream of a free trip to Brazil has never come true, we are still proud of this video. It was made by some guys who didn't major in film in the campus days.
Fortunately, half a year later, we won a grand prize for this Video in a contest sponsored by Intel. The award was a Sony laptop and some coolest digital stuffs back to the days.
And you know what, the biggest 'surprise' during the days we made this video was that, the pretty American girl in the video, Jessica Davis, had been a rhythmic gymnast and 1996 Olympian. When Martin and I invited her to join our project, we only knew that she's a foreign student in the university to study Chinese.
Ok, I have to stop my 'verbal pollution' right now. Please enjoy the video, folks.
