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When I was in China, these video sites were great for getting chinese material to watch. Ever since I came back though, these sites are too slow to watch anything.

Why are these so slow and is there a way to make them download faster?

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closed as off topic by Cocowalla, BertR, NS.X., xiaohouzi79 May 29 '13 at 4:08


Hello! Welcome to this site! I won't down-vote this question but I think it's not quite a question about Chinese language. I guess(just guess) you are slow because the server-end is designed not to respond to the request from overseas rapidly. When someone in China uses proxy to access to overseas sites, he would find he could not access some domestic sites. –  Huang Jan 8 '12 at 6:33
I'm in China. Yet Youtube is far faster than youku. Just have to make do with it. Youku sucks. –  Alex Su May 28 '13 at 13:52
I won't down-vote this question but I want to down-vote the up-vote. To the up-voter: this is not a BBS! –  NS.X. May 28 '13 at 22:10
The topic seems to be off topic, but I think the answer gets up-voted because it provides a good source of learning Chinese. –  Paul Allen May 30 '13 at 10:17

1 Answer 1

The great firewall being between you and the servers doesn't help, but the main reason is that they only have servers in China, not a distributed content network (CDN) like most of the sites you might regularly access (Google, Youtube, Facebook etc) so that the distance between you and the nearest server is quite great.

You should also be aware that they are progressively locking down content on these sites from overseas - they don't want people accessing illegal content from abroad - so long term they aren't your best bet for getting learning material

Check out sites like CNTV - it seems to load fairly quickly for me at least, and they are actively promoting it to international users as part of the 'soft power' aspect of growing China.

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