QVOD (Kuaibo)

» see kuaibo.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

There is a version of this product I did know. Around the middle of the 2000s, football that was not on a channel you paid for came through a peer-to-peer streaming client, and that was as true in Turkey as it was anywhere else. Everyone had one installed and none of them would have survived a direct question about legality. QVOD was that same idea taken to a scale nobody outside China ever attempted, and I learned it had existed years after it was gone.

Shenzhen Qvod Technology was registered in December 2007. Wang Xin started it out of a rented apartment of about ten square meters. The product was a media player, which is what people get wrong when they describe it as a website. You installed it on Windows, it opened RMVB and MP4 and FLV files like any other player, and it also resolved a qvod:// link into a stream assembled out of whoever else happened to be watching.

By 2011 it had the highest daily user reach of any video player in China, on revenue of around 130 million yuan. By 2012 installations were past three hundred million and the company employed roughly three hundred people.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it actually worked ~

The architecture is why the case against it was hard, and also why the difficulty stopped mattering. Qvod ran a streaming server system alongside the player, and any website could embed a QVOD link. The company hosted no films of its own. It resolved addresses and moved fragments between the machines of people already watching, which meant that the more popular an unlicensed film became, the cheaper it got to distribute.

That let Qvod argue it was a pipe rather than a library. The prosecution's answer was that the caching servers held copies and that the company understood perfectly well what was moving through them. Both readings are technically defensible, and that is exactly why a Chinese engineering audience took the case personally.

~ the raid and the license ~

Late in 2013 the National Copyright Administration found the company guilty of infringement and fined it 250,000 yuan. In December a group of video and entertainment companies came after it in court. On 22 April 2014 police entered the Shenzhen offices in Nanshan and the player and the mobile apps stopped working the same day, and the company announced a transformation of its business that never happened. In June its value-added telecommunications business license was revoked, which in China ends the argument.

The copyright penalty attached to the case was reported at the time as the heaviest ever imposed for piracy in China, around forty-two million dollars. The criminal case later added a fine of ten million yuan against the company itself.

~ the trial a million people watched ~

Wang Xin was arrested in August 2014 on a charge of disseminating obscene material for profit. His trial opened at the Haidian district court in Beijing on 7 January 2016 and the court livestreamed all of it. Proceedings ran past twenty hours and drew over a million viewers.

What turned it into an event was that Wang declined to play the role expected of him. He argued the case on engineering grounds in public, and the line repeated everywhere afterward was his claim that there is nothing shameful about technology itself. A great many Chinese developers watched a founder say that on a state court's own video feed and drew their own conclusions about where the line sits between building a tool and answering for what people do with it.

In September 2016 he was sentenced to three years and six months. He was released in 2018, the Shenzhen Intermediate People's Court confirmed the bankruptcy liquidation in September that year, and the corporate registration was finally struck off in May 2023. The player is still sitting on old Chinese download sites, pointing at servers that stopped answering more than a decade ago.

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