Friends: The Reunion ignites copyright battle among Chinese streaming video sites

Much beloved by Chinese urban youth, the special reunion episode of Friends was highly sought after by China’s video streaming sites

Users uploaded clips and full episodes to popular video-sharing site Bilibili, bringing accusations of piracy

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(From left) Matt LeBlanc, Matthew Perry, Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox and Lisa Kudrow in Friends: The Reunion reliving “The One with the Embryos” episode. Photo: HBO Max

Published: 8:30pm, 29 May 2021Updated: 4:21pm, 12 Feb 2022

Friends: The Reunion, a special production of the American television sitcom Friends, has become the latest copyright battleground for China’s video sites in a telltale sign of how competition and censorship are shaping how Chinese people access Western content.

Released this week, 17 years after the last episode aired, the special reunion episode was highly sought-after by Chinese streaming video sites with iQiyi, Tencent Video, as well as Alibaba-backed Youku all receiving licences to broadcast a censored version that removed cameo appearances from Lady Gaga, Korean boy band BTS and Justin Bieber. Alibaba is the owner of the South China Morning Post. The price for the licences has not been made public.

Airing on American broadcast television network NBC from 1994 to 2004, the television series was not available officially for most of China until Sohu.com won the rights in 2010. However, the proliferation of bootleg DVDs, and the unauthorised streaming on Chinese video sites, created a huge fan base among China’s urban youth. Sohu’s rights expired in 2018.

The three streaming video sites had banked on the reunion of some of the world’s most beloved characters to bring in additional subscribers and ad money but found that “uploaders” had rushed to republish the reunion on Bilibili, the video-sharing and streaming platform. Once regarded as a “good deed” on the Chinese internet, the practice is now unacceptable for sites that actually paid to air the show.

The official broadcast rights holders issued a joint statement of Friday, alleging that Bilibili had intentionally provided a platform for pirated versions of the Friends reunion special, condemning the “disrespect of intellectual property rights, open piracy and disruption of online video broadcasting order”.

Bilibili has not yet issued an official response, but a search for Friends on Friday generated very few results as the video platform has taken down almost all user-generated Friends content, except for one video featuring the opening song I’ll Be There For You by The Rembrandts.

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