• Chinese Online Video Company PPLive Raises A Whopping $250 Million

    Robin Wauters

    Robin Wauters is the European Editor of tech blog The Next Web and lead editor of Virtualization.com. He was a senior staff writer at TechCrunch until his departure in February 2012. Aside from his professional blogging activities, he’s an entrepreneur, event organizer, occasional board adviser and angel investor but most importantly an all-round startup champion. Wauters lives and works in... → Learn More

    Friday, February 4th, 2011

    PPLive, a Chinese online video company, has raised a monster Series D round from SoftBank, securing as much as $250 million.

    With the investment, SoftBank has taken a 35% stake in PPLive, which offers China’s leading online streaming and VOD service PPTV.

    As PPLive CEO Vincent Tao is keen to point out in a press statement, the round is larger than what rival Youku (often dubbed China’s YouTube) raised in its IPO ($203 million).

    PPLive says PPTV now boasts 200 million registered users and 105 million active monthly users (as of December 2010). Its website produces programming for more than 120 TV stations supported by a mix of advertising and pay-per-view. The average viewing time per person per day is said to have reached over 2 hours and 30 minutes.

    PPTV is powered by the online video company’s proprietary video distribution technology, PPCloud, which it says combines computing and peercasting algorithms capable of supporting millions of co-current viewers for live and high quality videos.

    It’s also a super colorful website, to say the least.

    Company: PPLive
    Website: pplive.com
    Launch Date: 2004
    Funding: $287M

    PPLive is a leading online TV company in China. Founded in 2004, as the first China online video media, PPLive offers the most influential and high sticky online TV services, PPTV. PPTV provides both live streaming and video–on-demand services throughout China. It is the largest aggregator of China TV programs with over 120 TV stations, several hundred live channels and 20,000 VOD channels. PPTV has more than 200 million user installations and 105 million active monthly user base (as...

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