But premium content has also become somewhat commoditized across online video sites in China.
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Most expect the second-tier video sites and group-buying sites to go out of business.
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Niche online video sites can offer the audience-focused content that specific audience segments want and need.
Major brands have long placed ads on music and video sites with little public reaction.
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The rise of video sites and streaming services have made tracking the popularity of a song much more complicated.
The third-party system, Vobile, is used by video sites to detect unauthorized posts.
Meanwhile, other video sites including Dailymotion, MSN's Soapbox and Myspace have all employed Audible Magic to filter all uploaded content.
Tony Chen, president of the China arm of GroupM Interaction, said he expects some streaming-video sites to close their doors.
Streaming video sites like Tudou, Ku6, OuOu and 6rooms all began paying fat fees to pipe video files around the country.
There are 20 such connections available now, from social-networking sites (Facebook, Twitter) to photo sites (Flickr, Picasa) to video sites (YouTube, Vimeo).
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The media industry, with its lumbering state giants and fragmented private sector, has created another opening: for online-video sites, such as Youku.
China's video sites were burning through their investment money without finding a business model, tapering off their CDN spending and shutting down.
Chinese Web video sites evolved quite differently from sites in the West.
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By combing through its clients' clips, the service creates signatures that allow the media companies to identify their content on user-generated video sites.
But China's own websites are fast enough that TV shows streamed online by video sites, like those run by Youku Tudou Inc.
But they don't suffer from as much legal scrutiny as better-known video sites, nor do they limit the length of clips uploaded by users.
The review said the online industry had to take greater responsibility when policing content posted to websites, such as video sites and social networks.
The two service deals make 56.com and Pomoho the first major Chinese video sites to address the problem of copyrighted content uploaded to user-generated sites.
"Many of the video sites still owe us money, " Wang laments.
With one click, you can send video from your favorite video sites directly to the TV, so you can watch them immediately or save them later.
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Competitors include China-based video sites Youku.com and 56.com, as well as other China Internet companies such as Baidu, Tencent, Sina and Shanda, which all have video sites.
More recently the distributor landed the film on video sites including Hulu and SnagFilms, where viewers can stream it for free or embed it on a blog.
These two classes of video sites--one that lets users upload videos and another that links them to movies and shows located elsewhere--work together in a careful symbiosis.
At the same time the growing use of blogs, social media, and video sites meant more and more people were equipped with the skills to spread information.
Today, YouTube has been unblocked in Brazil, and though Cicarelli's sex clip seems to have disappeared from YouTube, a host of other video sites still feature the footage.
Video sites like Dailymotion and Veoh participated in the partnership.
After Google and YouTube, the top 10 online video sites in terms of unique monthly viewers for February were: Facebook (61.2 million), Vevo (49.5 million), NDN (46.3 million), Yahoo!
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China's video sites can offer more content in part because much of what they air is approved by China's Ministry of Culture, which also oversees DVD releases, and not by broadcast-TV regulators.
To what degree the French ruling will apply to Google and Dailymotion's operations isn't clear: User-generated video sites in the U.S. are protected by the "safe harbor" provision of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act of 1999.
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