Chinese video website iQiyi brings Venice to China

iQiyi, one of China's leading video streaming sites, made a bold new move at this year's Venice Film Festival by cooperating with festival organizers to bring international films as well as live reports from the event to Chinese audiences.

This is not the first time that the company has cooperated with a film festival. Earlier this year, iQiyi launched a similar project, named "Online Festival Screening," with the cooperation of the Shanghai International Film Festival and the Summer International Film Festival in Hong Kong.

A main festival sponsor, the site uploaded a total of 26 films from present and past festivals on August 27, the opening day of the Venice Film Festival.

The films include Michele Placido's Romanzo Criminale (2005), Claudio Cupellini's Lezioni di Cioccolato (2007) and Gabriele Salvatores's Educazione Siberiana (2013).

Most of the films require a fee or a subscription to watch, with all income divided between iQiyi and the film companies.

iQiyi Vice President Yang Xianghua said that this idea had been brewing for a long time. "We often participate in film festivals and discovered that it's difficult to buy tickets for such festivals, no matter if they are at home or abroad, especially tickets for good films," Yang said.

"It's also very difficult to find and watch these films after the festivals are over, even pirated copies off the Internet," he added, further explaining how the current development of the Internet removes the limitations that come with ticket sales and location. This motivated iQiyi to experiment with bringing quality films from festivals to their website.

The project has been beneficial to Italian films and filmmakers as well.

At a time when the Chinese film market has been largely dominated by Hollywood blockbusters, video websites like iQiyi open a new way for Chinese audiences to get to know Italian films.

"There were about 305 films screened in theaters in China last year, among which 60 came from overseas. American films account for 43 of those 60 films, while not a single one came from Italy," Yang said, pointing out that compared to the limited screens and run times that exist in theaters, video websites have the ability to include many more films. Currently, iQiyi has 5,000 films available on its site, with 2,000 of them from abroad.

"The Internet is a very good low-cost platform, where the Chinese audience can get to know Italian films, directors and actors. Audiences will only be willing to buy a ticket for a film in the theater after they become interested in a director's or actor's work," Yang explained, adding that young people born during the 1990s and 2000s, and who are likely to become the major ticket buyers in the near future, largely rely on the Internet to get information on everything, including films.

While most video websites surged in China during the mid-2000s by providing a large quantity of user-generated content by ordinary netizens, iQiyi - owned by searching engine company Baidu - started in 2010 by streaming TV shows and films to which it had purchased the streaming rights.

The company later moved on to self-produced shows a year later and has recently begun to invest in film production and cooperation with film festivals.

iQiyi CEO Gong Yu explained that the business model for a successful Chinese website is different from models in Western countries.

"In Western countries, one needs to take one-aspect of a business model to its extreme. In China, we start from one point … and then keep transitioning to a diversified business model," Gong said.

iQiyi's hope is that the Venice Film Festival will lead to more cooperation with film festivals around the world.