HBO teams up with Tencent to sell its TV shows in China
China's strained relationship with the concept of intellectual property is one of the reasons that you can buy a local copy of a Range Rover Evoque for a third of the price. That's one of the reasons why western businesses are wary about selling their products in the nation, since it can often be time consuming and expensive. Still, it looks as if HBO is going to try and buck the trend after recruiting Tencent to distribute shows such as Game of Thrones, Rome and True Detective through the latter's Tencent Video streaming service.
It could be that the move is thanks, at least in part, to the government's recent crackdown on sites like YYETS, which offered downloads of popular US shows. Both as a pean to its trading partners in the west but also as a method of exerting control over what its citizens watch. For instance, these HBO shows will have to be run in front of China's notorious censors, which is likely chop out the sex, language and violence so commonplace in shows like The Sopranos and Boardwalk Empire. There's no date on when localized episodes will be made available to buy, but we imagine that the finished product will look a little like the video below.
