Tudou, China’s Internet TV giant, has announced that a redesign, new social features and original content are about to appear to kick-start its 100 day “True Dou” campaign.
This is the first major shift since the Youku Tudou’s parent companies merged in August this year. According to the company, ‘True Dou’ will help to distinguish the Youku and Tudou brands which are operated under its dual-platform strategy.
After years of fierce competition, it seems that even together these two giants of the Chinese web are still unwilling to integrate, but instead have chosen to run in parallel and distinct ways.
The new campaign highlights the youthful, fashion-forward nature of the Tudou brand with a clean new site design. There will be three new channels of Tudou-specific content available; Tudou Original, Entertainment, and Animation.
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A larger, sleeker video player is front and center in Tudou’s new layout and a new discussion feature, “Doupao,” presents users with a way to discuss videos in real-time.
Doupao creates pop-up bubbles on top of videos to display the feeds of comments. The company says that this is a more natural way of showing content than ‘shunting comments to the bottom of the video page, or sending users to microblogging services for discussion’.
The whole kit and kaboodle goes live to the public on September 26 and with 99 more days of the campaign it will be interesting to see what else the Eastern Internet giants will have up their sleeves.
Original Web TV
Tudou has also announced three new self-produced programs under its youth-focused Tudou Original brand. The first of these, “Yif Magic,” premieres on Tudou in conjunction with the revamped website, and will offer weekly installments of entertainment programming every Friday.
The forthcoming “Tudou Surfin'” and “Tudou Groovin'” series will present regular video magazine-style updates on global pop music, celebrities, and the entertainment industry. And we thought MTV was cool in the 80s….
“The Chinese online video industry has been characterized by fierce competition for the past several years,” said Youku Tudou Chairman, CEO Victor Koo. “Now that Youku and Tudou are no longer competing with one another, it’s time to let both sites be themselves. Tudou’s new design and identity position it to appeal to younger, more independent audiences than the more general audience served by Youku.”
Youku and Tudou, China’s number 1 and 2 online video platforms. They have a combined reach of around 310 million unique viewers per week, with only 14% daily overlap and 18% weekly overlap in users.
Image Credit: Marc van der Chijs
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