It doesn't matter, when people or any English media speaks of the world, what they really meant was mostly English speaking World. Ignoring China most of the time.
Not the first time I have seen something like World First, World biggest etc when it is not true.
How are they not the biggest service?
Talking about paying users only, maybe Netflix is still on the top - not for long, of course.
> According to research firm IHS Markit, video streaming in China will more than quadruple from $3.5 billion in 2015, to $17.6 billion in 2020. Membership payment will take up a bigger share of the pie, increasing over 500% to $2.6 billion, with the rest coming from advertising revenue.
But talking about active users, iQiyi now have more than 500 million active users.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/ywang/2018/03/07/the-billion-do...
Yes, but it's all Chinese services combined, not just their top 1st. Unless every of those Chinese subscribers pay for the same service, Netflix is still probably the 1st worldwide paying video service.
But talking about active users, iQiyi now have more than 500 million active users.
Which is small compared to YouTube's 1.8 billion.
But fair enough, maybe YouTube and iQiyi are the biggest players; foepys was still at least half-right.
It does seem that iQiyi is using HEVC for high-res content as well, so the point still stands :)
> Compared with the US, China still has plenty of room to grow in a country with a population of about 1.4 billion and 751 million internet users. The proportion of internet users who pay for video content has increased more than 10 times in four years, rising to 13.2 per cent in 2016, and is expected to further increase to 40 per cent in 2022, iResearch said. By comparison, Netflix’s US-based paying members represented around 28.1 per cent of total internet video users in the country as of the end of 2016.
https://www.scmp.com/tech/article/2137870/chinas-consumers-a...