Viki CEO and co-founder Razmig Hovaghimian told me during a call Tuesday that this is part of the company’s larger strategy of content arbitrage — it cheaply licenses out-of-market content, gets help from its community when it comes to translating these shows and then monetizes that content through advertising.

Hovaghimian in particular highlighted the deal with Japan’s TV Asahi, which is going to include titles like CSI: Crime Scene Talks 2 and the Tradegy of W. It’s the first time TV Asahi has made any of its content available outside of Japan, and he told me that it took two years to make this happen.

Viki is one of a number of companies licensing this kind of content to bring it to foreign markets, with others including Dramafever, Crunchyroll and Viewster. One of the differences is that Viki is purely ad-based.

Viki is also using a very analytic approach towards content licensing, testing out formats with its community and licensing only content that’s popular with its viewers. Hovaghimian said that Viki often stumbles across unexpected niche markets this way. For example, it realized last year that Korean content is big in Latin America, with some shows getting up to 1.3 million viewers on Viki. At that point, it’s not really long tail content anymore, argued Hovaghimian: “We view it as the torso.”

But that is indeed the case, according to annual research conducted for UK communications regulator Ofcom…

Although at least half of those polled in eight other countries said they never pay for content, that was just 16 percent in China, where more than half of internet users sometimes or regularly do so.

These are much desired numbers for online operators who find it hard to get consumers to cough up. So what’s going on here?

Back in the summer I questioned a different research exercise for finding unexpectedly high numbers of people who planned to watch the Olympics online. The finding did not tally with what we know about internet adoption that, whilst booming among urbanites, is growing more slowly elsewhere.

Like that research, Ofcom’s naturally skews toward young, urban and more affluent consumers — as opposed to the much poorer citizens in more rural areas — because this is where China still sits on its internet adoption curve.

In the same way, note how — surprisingly — a far higher percentage of people in China than elsewhere (around three quarters) say the internet is their main source of national news… Whilst internet adoption has reached mass-participation levels in many western countries, it simply isn’t true to say that three quarters of Chinese are online…

That is not necessarily a bad thing, depending on who you are — this early adopter herd is at least a ring-fenced segment of attractive demographics for any internet services looking for customers.

Amongst the most successful so far is Tencent, the diversified giant that ranks #9 on our paidContent 50 list of the world’s highest revenue-earning digital content companies and which this summer told us over 30 million of its then 752 million members were paying 10RMB  ($1.60) per month.

In time, as China’s internet demographic begins to more closely resemble its nation’s — by way of low-cost handsets, for example — I would expect this curiously high proclivity to pay to wane. And content operators may be forced to accept lower fees than they do in other parts of the world.

The outfit is taking $25 million from Mistui Global Investments and Orix Ventures, saying it is ”setting its sights on the Asia-Pacific region”.

Kaltura’s online video platform is supposedly used by over 300,000 clients, including in the enterprise and at media companies, who can either buy in Kaltura’s own commercial service or host its open-source software themselves.

The outfit already expanded in to Europe earlier this summer. VentureBeat has called Kaltura a ”next billion-dollar enterprise tech company”. It has previously raised a $2.1 million first round, a big $21 million second round in 2008 and a $20 million raise from Intel Capital and others in 2011.

Vietnam and Hong Kong are Asia-Pacific’s top online video-viewing countries, according to comScore (and via Digital Strategy Consulting)…

A day after rival video service Youku Tudou secured a deal to stream premium movies from an eighth and final Hollywood major studio, Tencent has got in touch to flag its own numbers.

Citing iResearch data, the outfit says its 275.5 million monthly Tencent Video users has grown to exceed even the recently merged Youku’s 266.3 million, while its average 54.8 minutes per user per day spent on-site beats Youku’s 34 minutes.

Although Youku Tudou now has an increasingly impressive professional content line-up, Tencent’s media briefing cites an Aegis executive who explains: “The reason why Tencent Video has achieved more unique visitors than Youku is the parent company’s ownership of social media properties that have pushed traffic towards its video site via social sharing.”

That would suggest scale can beat prestige and premium content when it comes to drawing eyeballs — or, at least, that domestic content trumps Hollywood imports. Tencent has an arsenal of services including its QQ IM network with over 700 million users, Qzone and Pengyou social networks, games, the Weixin mobile community client, and a Twitter rival with around 400 million registered users. Tencent placed at #9 in this year’s paidContent 50 list of the world’s biggest digital content earners.

If broadband speeds can continue increasing sufficiently, China’s online video viewing market could be set to explode.

Recently, I reported how one video service was even manufacturing its own internet-connected TV to take its content direct to living rooms.

Yet another new platform hopeful aims to replicate the pattern in which China is also seeing a creative explosion of smartphone systems thanks to operators and services rebadging Google’s Android.

Xiaomi, which has found success by releasing the low-cost M-1 Android handset running a slick firmware variant dubbed “MIUI”, is now planning to unveil an Android-powered internet TV set-top box.

iResearch concludes: “A Xiaomi set-top box would attract even closer comparisons between the company’s product line and Apple’s. Xiaomi founder Lei Jun is sometimes referred to as the ‘Chinese Steve Jobs’.”

Youku Tudou has gained a distribution license from Sony Pictures Television (SPT) to offer 300 Sony Pictures titles through its Youku Premium service (announcement).

The SPT deal is the eighth and final deal with a Hollywood major studio and runs for five years, giving the service a long window in which to exploit Chinese demand for premium internet video.

Although Youku and Tudou, like YouTube in the west, launched with a focus on amateur uploads, they are also fast trying to secure A-list movie and TV content.

Youku launched its Premium service comprising TV and films in beta in 2010. The service offers both subscription and on-demand access.

VP Huilong Zhu (via release) today disclosed it has around two million paying users:

“Subscriber growth for Youku Premium has exceeded our expectations, and we see it as a sign that Chinese audiences are willing and eager to pay for quality content. By providing a wide range of payment and subscription options, Youku Tudou has made it as simple as possible for them to do so.”

Last month, in its annual report for the year to December 31, 2011, Youku said Youku Premium had “processed more than one million paid orders, which include both pay-per-view and subscription orders … though we currently derive minimal revenues from subscription-based and pay-per-view services”.

Those revenues are now likely to grow — but the attractive deals also further threaten Youku Tudou’s bottom line. The pair consolidated in a big merger deal this summer precisely to save on the costs of content acquisition and broadband infrastructure, the latter of which has become especially burdensome.

Youku Premium will count around 3,000 titles in total, including 450 from Hollywood, by year’s end.

Sony Pictures titles include older fare like Groundhog Day, Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Sense and Sensibility plus newer releases including Men in Black 3, The Amazing Spider-Man and 21 Jump Street.

However, Hastings ruled out similar partnerships for further expansion into continental Europe. Netflix hasn’t said yet where it wants to go next; the company has a policy of returning to global profitability before it enters any additional foreign markets.

Hastings and Netflix CFO David Wells got some pointed questions about their international plans during Tuesday’s call, with some analysts apparently feeling that the company should slow down on its plans abroad and instead focus on improving its domestic performance. Netflix only added 1.16 million domestic streaming subscribers in Q3 of 2012, and the company lowered its forecast of total subscribers for 2012 from 7 million to 5 million.

The picture is looking a little better abroad, but questions remain about several of its new markets, with one analyst even asking whether the company is considering to pull out of select countries in Latin America. Wells dismissed that idea, and the company’s VP of Finance and Investor Relations Ellie Mertz instead explained how Netflix is working with local banks to make sure that people can actually pay for its service.

Wells also had some interesting insights to share into the role exclusive content is going to play for Netflix. Next year, exclusive content will still only amount for “certainly less than 10 percent of hours viewed, maybe less than 5 percent of hours viewed” on Netflix, he mused. But in the long term, the expectation is that the majority of content on Netflix will be exclusive content, he said, adding that it turns out to be a great investment: “Some exlusive content costs more, but it’s worth more because it is viewed more.”

Overall, the tone of Tuesday’s call was somewhat sobering. Netflix missed another subscriber goal, and Hastings said that he was tired of making excuses. “It is what it is, and we are moving forward,” he said during his closing statement.

Last week, Yahoo announced it will close its Korean business, explaining: “Despite the hard work of the team, the Korean operation has faced growing challenges over the past few years that now make scaling our business very difficult.”

Contrast that with App Annie data showing a 6x increase in Google Play revenue in the country since January…

What accounts for the difference?

Well, much of that growth in Android app revenue is likely because Google has this year improved payment options in its app store, including introducing subscriptions and in-app payments. After all, iTunes Store, which already had such functionality, has seen flat app revenue.

And other App Annie data shows the national picture is far from all about growth – app downloads across iOS and Android haven’t grown all year…

The difference appears to be that Google has a mobile apps ecosystem while Yahoo has only an advertising business.

Advertising firm JC Decaux reckons advertising spend in South Korea will slow from 2011′s 8.8 percent to 4.4 percent in 2013. But ZenithOptimedia reckons the market will grow by $1.6 billion by 2014.

AP reports:

“Yahoo’s South Korean market share has become negligible in recent years as users flocked to Naver, Daum and other portals operated by South Korean internet firms.

“Yahoo Korea was also hurt by the rapid adoption of smartphones and the mobile Internet, which made it more difficult to attract advertisers to web portals designed for desktop computers. Overture Korea added to problems by failing to renew key advertising deals.”

KoreanClick gives Yahoo just a 1.5 percent share of search (via WSJ).

Redmond, WA-based mobile advertising firm Red Loop Media says it won a contract to power mobile ads for China’s state news network.

China Xinhua News Corporation (CNC) is part of the country’s official Xinhua News Agency, which reports to the Communist Party, and began broadcasting in 2010. CNC recently launched mobile apps, like this for iPhone, offering live and on-demand video news.

Red Loop says it will serve ads in to the apps and provide targeting and analytics. It is a follow-up to a deal the firm announced in June to power mobile ads for China National Radio’s apps.

Western tech companies generally have a hard time trying to break China. Amongst large players, Facebook still has not broken through and Google has had to balance commerce with censorship, while local outfits are creatively building their own services on the back of Silicon Valley software. The prospects for smaller vendors might, therefore, have appeared even more remote.

But Red Loop’s success there appears to come because the Redmond firm also operates a distinct Chinese subsidiary. Earlier this year, the Chinese version of Newsweek selected the firm to power its mobile and tablet app ads. The company uses MWave, an advertising firm staffed by former Chinese ad agency sales execs, in its efforts there.

If this mixing of Chinese propaganda and US-style techno-capitalism blends like oil and water, recall, too, that the People’s Daily newspaper, an organ of China’s ruling Communist Part, took its online news operation public in April to raise around 1.55 billion yuan ($245.45 million) to finance improvements to its mobile news service. The publisher, which takes a quarter of its content from Xinhua, wants to retain its influence by catering to a younger generation of citizen that is rapidly adopting mobile and social platforms.

China’s smartphone segment is booming, with many internet users now going straight to phone, leapfrogging landline connections, and the country is seeing a creative explosion in Android tinkering.

Xinhua reports to the Propaganda and Public Information Department in China.

But an even more intriguing variant of that opportunity might be owning the TVs, too.

That is what Chinese video site LeTV is doing, having announced it will sell something it’s calling “Super LeTV”.

The company says the idea is to profit from “Hardware + Contents + Sharing Revenues from Apps + Terminal advertisements”, reports TechNode, which says LeTV’s holding company has put up RMB 28.28 million ($4.5 million) for the project.

LeTV is committing to invest between RMB 500 million ($79.5 million) and RMB 1.5 billion ($238 million) in to the new business, according to Marbridge Consulting, which says Beijing incubator Innovation Works will invest in to the operation.

TechInAsia: “If such a television were to take hold in China, one would think it would bode well for online video companies, most notably for Youku/Tudou as the most dominant player in that space.”

LeTV already unveiled its own set-top box earlier this year, so an integrated TV is not such a stretch. Manufacture would be sub-contracted out.

As well as amateur video, LeTV and its peers Youku and Tudou host premium video from TV and movie makers.

The new regulations were passed in June, when the offence became a criminal rather than civil one, but only take effect from now.

In many countries around the world, approaching piracy has been balancing out in to a mix of graduated-response action (education, bandwidth throttling, sometimes disconnection), website takedowns and better legal content services. But Japan’s move is significantly more draconian.

Sony Music Unlimited was the first major streaming service to launch in the country this July – years after others in countries elsewhere.

BBC News: “The Recording Industry Association of Japan (RIAJ) had pushed for the move, suggesting that illegal media downloads outnumbered legal ones by about a factor of 10.

“The figure is based on a 2010 study which suggested that people in the country downloaded about 4.36 billion illegally pirated music and video files and 440 million purchased ones that year.”

Half-year internet music sales in Japan were 133 percent higher than a year earlier, according to RIAJ, while mobile music sales rose 63 percent and internet music subscriptions were 102 percent higher.