Streaming Western Movies and TV Shows

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  • #42668
    Avatar photoniklas
    Participant

    Some big American TV shows were removed from Chinese streaming services earlier this year or so, but now since a week or two back it seems like almost everything is gone? Barely any western movies left. Haven’t seen any news article about this, but there must be?

    I’ve usually been using souhu and PPTV for streaming movies and TV shows but they’ve removed most of the western movies and TV shows now.

    Know of any good alternative? Or just gotta resort to downloading?

    #42669
    Avatar photoBen
    Moderator

    Youku? They have Gotham which just started. I download everything; better quality and you don’t have to put up with adverts. If you have a PC that you can leave on then you can use utorrent/transmission + rss to grab stuff automatically. Flexget is particular good with rss feeds as it can link to imdb to automatically download movies from your watchlist when they become available.

    #42670
    Avatar photoCharlie
    Keymaster

    American TV shows were more popular than Chinese shows so the government had them removed to allows Chinese shows, unimpeded by foreign competition, to flourish.

    Here’s a Chinese article describing this and a Chinasmack post with commentary.

    At least they still don’t care about copyright law and you’re free to download whatever you want, or buy pirate DVD’s or Blu-Ray. But you can’t stream them because they’ve been harmonized.

    edit: beat me to it Ben. I agree with your point about downloading being preferable anyway. Chinese video streaming sites are low quality and heavy-handed with advertisements.

    #42678
    Avatar photoniklas
    Participant

    Youku? They have Gotham which just started. I download everything; better quality and you don’t have to put up with adverts. If you have a PC that you can leave on then you can use utorrent/transmission + rss to grab stuff automatically. Flexget is particular good with rss feeds as it can link to imdb to automatically download movies from your watchlist when they become available.

    Thanks. Seems like all Chinese streaming services including Youku have removed most western movies and TV shows though. I’m familiar with downloading torrents via RSS feeds etc but prefer streaming if there’s a good alternative. Seems like there isn’t though.

    #42679
    Avatar photoCharlie
    Keymaster

    Thanks. Seems like all Chinese streaming services including Youku have removed most western movies and TV shows though. I’m familiar with downloading torrents via RSS feeds etc but prefer streaming if there’s a good alternative. Seems like there isn’t though.

    You can sign up for Netflix, but you’d have to be going through a VPN.

    #42680
    Avatar photoniklas
    Participant

    edit: beat me to it Ben. I agree with your point about downloading being preferable anyway. Chinese video streaming sites are low quality and heavy-handed with advertisements.

    I disagree. I’d say some Chinese streaming services are really good. I’ve been using the sohu and PPTV iPhone and iPad apps and stream it’s video to my Apple TV. They used to have lots of western movies and TV shows in 1080p. I don’t mind the occasional 60 second advertisements before a movie/episode starts playing. Sure some of these services have horrible websites, but the mobile apps are usually really good.

    Streaming from Chinese services is especially convenient when watching with Chinese friends who want to watch with subtitles. When downloading I have to get subtitles manually.

    #42682
    Avatar photoyin
    Participant

    try demonoid.ph and eztv.it

    #42683
    Avatar photoyin
    Participant

    Streaming from Chinese services is especially convenient when watching with Chinese friends who want to watch with subtitles. When downloading I have to get subtitles manually.

    not sure which media player you’re using.
    if you need subtitle for your downloads, try splayer from splayer.org
    It will automatically match and download the subs for you. and it even has a “international version”.

    a few main stream chinese mediaplayer has the equivalent feature but no english version. plus they all have way too much pupup spams.

    #42684
    Avatar photoniklas
    Participant

    not sure which media player you’re using.
    if you need subtitle for your downloads, try splayer from splayer.org
    It will automatically match and download the subs for you. and it even has a “international version”.

    Ah right. I’m usually using VLC, but wouldn’t mind using some other one. I’ll try SPlayer and see if there’s some other good alternatives too. Thanks for the advice!

    #42685
    Avatar photoCharlie
    Keymaster

    I’d say some Chinese streaming services are really good. I’ve been using the sohu and PPTV iPhone and iPad apps and stream it’s video to my Apple TV. They used to have lots of western movies and TV shows in 1080p. I don’t mind the occasional 60 second advertisements before a movie/episode starts playing. Sure some of these services have horrible websites, but the mobile apps are usually really good. Streaming from Chinese services is especially convenient when watching with Chinese friends who want to watch with subtitles. When downloading I have to get subtitles manually.

    Never used the apps before but the websites are a huge pain. Advertisements everywhere, searching for anything doesn’t work because the names are in Chinese (sometimes there’s more than one Chinese name for a single show), quality is bad, etc. Even streaming “HD” on PPTV doesn’t look great for me, maybe it has to do with the content that I’ve tried streaming. I wish I could stream the World Cup in HD but otherwise I’m happier entirely avoiding the Chinese internet.

    You mention you have an Apple TV, it might be worth your time to look into setting up XBMC. I run it on an Amazon Fire TV which costs about 600 rmb on Taobao. There are multiple content streaming services that work through XBMC (like “Genesis” which apparently streams thousands of movies and TV shows, although I haven’t tried it). I use it to play movies and tv shows that I’ve downloaded, and getting Chinese subs for anything takes about ten seconds, it’s all automatic.

    If I were in the states I’d probably use Netflix, but in China I think downloading content is still best, for now. I recently stopped downloading music and started paying for Spotify and it has been pretty amazing. I look forward to switching to streaming all video content one day, but for now the selection is too limited and the quality doesn’t come close to downloaded HD movies and tv shows.

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