China's Digital-Streaming War is Intensifying

China's digital-streaming market is in the middle of a battle royale. The country's population has an unquenchable thirst for watching movies and TV shows online, and several very large and deep-pocketed players are fighting to attract their attention.

Last week, I wrote about the accelerated growth rate of Baidu's (NASDAQ: BIDU) digital-streaming platform, iQiyi. Favorably referred to as "The Netflix of China," iQiyi is vastly expanding its content library to woo users, which leads to advertisers and paying subscribers. iQiyi has nearly 500 million users, is more than doubling its revenue every year, and now comprises 16% of Baidu's overall top line.

Of course, China's lucrative online-entertainment industry is also attracting several other competitors. There are more than 700 million Chinese internet users and 435 million mobile video viewers up for grabs. Web browsers tend to continually return to only a few favorite websites, so online streaming could very well turn out to be a winner-take-all market. The companies that offer the greatest variety of content and the most user-friendly experiences will likely capture the lion's share of the industry's profits.

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Source: Fool.com