One World live streams were blocked in China, but netizens watched anyway

Chinese video platforms say they still plan to eventually release a recording of the charity concert that raised funds for Covid-19 relief

Reading Time:2 minutes

One World live streams were blocked in China, but netizens watched anyway

Published: 8:31pm, 20 Apr 2020Updated: 8:31pm, 20 Apr 2020

This article originally appeared on ABACUS

This past weekend, tens of millions of people across the globe watched One World: Together At Home. The star-studded online concert raised nearly US$128 million to support health care workers around the world in the fight against the Covid-19 pandemic.

Social media in China was also buzzing about the concert -- but that’s in spite of the fact that there was no official source available on Chinese streaming sites.

According to Global Citizen’s official page for the concert, people were supposed to be able to watch on Alibaba’s Youku and Tencent Video. But on Monday, hours after the event ended, the time listed for the concert on both platforms still displayed “TBA” -- to be announced.

How Youku went from being China’s YouTube to China’s Hulu

Tencent and Alibaba did not respond to questions about their plans for airing the concert.

(Abacus is a unit of the South China Morning Post, which is owned by Alibaba.)

Hong Kong singer Eason Chan performed two songs during the One World: Together At Home concert’s six-hour pre-show. (Picture: Handout)

One Chinese company that did stream the concert live is ByteDance… but not in China. ByteDance said it live-streamed the concert to global users on TikTok. However, for the Chinese version of the popular short video app, known as Douyin, ByteDance said the event will be aired “soon,” without elaborating. The same goes for short video competitor Kuaishou and video site Bilibili, which has a page for the event but no video.