Xunlei Kankan

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

~ the last words ~

Outside China the parent company's name traveled as an entry on ban lists. Trackers refused Xunlei clients on the grounds that the software pulled far more out of a swarm than it put back, and for years that was the entire meaning of the word in any language other than Mandarin. It was also the smaller half of what the company did. The larger half was a video site with more monthly visitors than there are people in Russia, and it never crossed a border in either direction.

Kankan started in 2007 on top of the download stack Xunlei had been building since 2003 in Shenzhen. The delivery was a hybrid: content servers carried part of the stream and the audience carried the rest, peer to peer, the same trick the download client used. Academic papers were written about how well it worked. For a company whose core product was a thing that made files arrive faster, putting a movie player on the same plumbing was not a pivot at all.

The peak on the player side came in September 2011, when it held 29.6 percent of the Chinese video-player market and sat second. The peak on the web side came later: 136 million monthly unique visitors in March 2014. A monthly package ran about three dollars and bought you premium titles without advertising. A separate pay-per-view shelf held over 800 films and had 155,000 buyers that same month, which tells you what the ratio between browsing and paying actually was.

Video licensing is drawn along national lines and always has been, so a catalog like this is unreachable from anywhere it was not licensed for, and the reachable part is the login page. The distance here is not language or connection speed. It is that a product can carry a hundred and thirty six million people a month and still be a blank to anyone four thousand kilometers west of it, and the blank is mutual.

~ the record ~

~ one hundred and thirty million yuan ~

On 1 April 2015 Xunlei announced it was selling its entire stake in Kankan to Beijing Nesound International Media for 130 million yuan, roughly twenty million dollars at the rate that month. The closing was 15 July 2015: 104 million paid on the day, the remaining 26 million due a year later. Xunlei had gone public on Nasdaq nine months earlier, selling 7.315 million shares at twelve dollars, and Xiaomi had put 200 million dollars in that April.

The stated reason is the tidiest corporate sentence in this grave, so it is worth quoting close to whole: the board wanted to streamline non-core and unprofitable businesses and free up management attention for its mobile strategy. Video was expensive, licensed content was more expensive every year, and the money was in subscriptions to the accelerator. A company with a Nasdaq listing and a shareholder like Xiaomi does not keep a division that loses money in a market where everyone loses money.

~ three names in ten years ~

The buyer renamed it on 12 August 2015. Xunlei Kankan became Xiangchao Kankan, which is the parent's own name bolted onto the front, and in 2017 it changed again to Tiantian Kankan. Official updates to the standalone client stopped around 2018. Xunlei itself later shipped a different video player under a different name, so the lineage forks: the brand went one way with the buyer and the software went another way with the seller.

kankan.com does not answer now. kankan.xunlei.com still returns a page, which is the address doing what old addresses at large companies do, standing there without a product behind it. Somewhere in the middle of all that renaming the thing 136 million people opened every month stopped being any of these.

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