China remains a challenging market for distributors seeking to place content from the US onto its local services, but opportunity does remain for sellers of both UK and US content. Show Tracker reveals some of the most interesting acquisitions picked up across 2024 and 2025 so far.
Warner Bros. Discovery has long held a deal with Tencent Video for its titles to appear on the SVOD in the first window. While highly publicised as an HBO deal, it has more recently started to include titles from Warner’s wider distribution catalogue, finding homes for genres that historically can struggle to travel to non-anglophone markets, such as the multi-camera comedy 'Night Court' (NBC).
In a market devoid of both Amazon Prime and Netflix, the opportunity exists for SVOD Original rights holders to find homes for them with third parties in the region. Sohu Video has become increasingly interested in these types of acquisitions, recently acquiring Disney+ Original 'Loki' from Disney and Amazon Prime Original 'Classified' from Sony.
Warner, meanwhile, has also managed to simultaneously license some of its most recent premieres to not only Tencent, but also its rivals Sohu and Bilibili. The studio hasn’t agreed non-exclusive deals like this for all of its content catalogue – 'Landscapers' and 'House of the Dragon' are notable examples of titles that have remained exclusive to Tencent. Warner has engaged in the most of these types of deals over the years, accounting for 50% of non-exclusive first window sales since 2020 in China.
While there are certainly many obstructions that can prevent US content being licensed into China, some of the more recent premieres that have made it through demonstrate the opportunities that remain unique to the market. Licensing titles to multiple SVODs at once can bring a higher return while increasing the chances of later seasons being acquired too, while the lack of Netflix and Amazon Prime allows rights holders typically unwilling to sell to third parties a window to do so.
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