I have been running a live streaming app here in China for two years.
The title of this gets so wrong - China did not ban livestreaming. Yes, the regulation of livestreaming services gets very very tight recently, we have been fined due to inappropriate content.
The website mentioned in the article like Weibo, AcFun are not about livestreaming, they're YouTube-like video sites. You need special license to run YouTube-like video sites, just the license is almost impossible to apply for non state-run company. There are only 500 something licenses ever issued, you need to acquire a company that have the license, surely the price is extremely high due to scarcity.
I'm confused. So are you saying China is banning Weibo, iFeng, and ACFUN from displaying videos (But not from livestreaming, since those sites don't do livestreams?) since they don't have a license?
The article says:
> On Thursday, the government ordered Weibo, iFeng and ACFUN to stop all its video and audio streaming services, according to an FT report.
Government ordered Weibo, iFent and AcFun to 关停上述网站上的视听节目服务 stop the video and audio programme service because of not having license [1].
So what's video and audio programme? It has a definition, but in practice it has to be interpreted some way. That's why regulation can GET tight sometimes. China is complicated.
I'm still not sure I understand. Maybe something is being lost in translation here, but I don't see how you'd interpret, "audio and visual programing" in a way that doesn't include livestreaming.
Are Weibo, iFeng, and ACFUN popular sites in China for livestreaming or sharing videos? I know if a western government ordered YouTube, Twitch, and Facebook to "stop their video and audio program service" in their country that could most definitely be interpreted as a ban on livestreaming (or even on all forms of streaming in general), even if the ban didn't include smaller sites like Vimeo or Periscope.
If I am reading btw0's comment correctly, it isn't that they are ordering them to stop serving video forever, but instead that they are illegally doing so, because they do not have the proper license. Should they acquire the proper license, they would be able to provide the "video and audio program" features again.
Now, as btw0 notes, these licenses are scarce, and so this amounts to a _de facto_ ban of a sort for people who only know about these popular sites, but it is not a ban in the strict sense.
So it's like the case of TV news in Venezuela, where you can't say the government banned news in general, only news that don't pass their censorship. Chinese get to see video streams, but only those the government wants to spoon-feed them.
First of all, it is not a complete ban. It is a very strict requirement of license.
Second of all, live streaming is definitely censored in the same way. But the sites mentioned, Weibo, iFeng, and ACFUN, have no live streaming service, only (what is the word for not live?) streaming service.
