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The story
On August 19, Chinese video-sharing service “bilibili” began rolling out its global app for Android. The service stands out for letting users sign up without submitting ID verification documents, and the thread ranged from wariness toward Chinese-made apps and comparisons to Niconico’s decline, to practical speculation that YouTube’s tightened monetization rules could push long-form creators to migrate there.
Chinese video-sharing service “bilibili” announced via its official X account on August 19 that it has begun offering a global version of its app. Only the Android version is available so far, and it can be downloaded from Google Play in Japan as well. An iOS version is expected soon.
The company touted several features of the global version: access to videos from around the world, optimization for users in each country, and a simplified sign-up process that doesn’t require submitting identity verification documents. It says it will keep improving localization and adding features going forward.
The global version’s icon is the same pink as the existing app, but has a small globe mark in the upper left corner to distinguish it. Bug reports and feedback are handled through the official Discord server, and the company plans to expand to more countries over time.
Source: itmedia.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
Our content gets shut down
while they get to run wild — come on.
Natsuno blew money on pointless stuff
while slacking on server upgrades and system improvements,
so everyone turned their backs and left. (Natsuno = former Niconico/Dwango chairman Nobuo Natsuno)
It's not that — it's simply that they've got no customers.
Just found one about a guy walking all the way from Shanghai to Shenzhen.
https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1yh8w6RE4b/
And yet it's weird that Sony has actually invested in it.
The customers left because they strangled themselves.
Apple, don't you dare let this through App Store review.
that's the gap between Japan and China.
Isn't that basically what Japan was doing about 40 years ago?
Since it costs no extra effort and there's zero downside, expect a wave of creators to just cross-post to both platforms while they wait and see.
can you actually watch the newest anime on it?
With AI translation and dubbing, views should climb at least among audiences with similar grammar like Korea, or across Asian regions with high cultural familiarity, boosting playcounts
(like how Japanese-language posts are booming overseas on X right now).
Since both impressions and payouts weight retention heavily, long-form creators are bound to be interested.
And since YouTube picked this exact moment to raise the monetization bar and shut the door on newcomers, new long-form creators will naturally just start out on bilibili instead.
bilibili was definitely timing this lol
No Japanese people are gonna flock to "Buri-biri" lol
Re: #39
The monetization bar for new long-form creators just got twice as hard, and starting August 24 even existing creators face a downgrade where a click instantly counts as a view — which just tanks retention and squeezes revenue. So yeah, everyone's simply interested.
And thanks to TikTok, both creators and viewers stopped caring ages ago about whether a platform is Chinese lol
In the West, individuals and groups actually keep watch on this kind of thing,
but I never hear of Japanese people doing that.
If it lands in Japan, couldn't people sue for damages under Japanese law?
Isn't that one of the companies from the early days of video-sharing apps?
People can just go watch it on their own, but lately they're saying weird stuff like it's "landing in Japan."
As for services, Youku — which launched around the same time as YouTube — is probably the older one.
Youku used to be China's leading video-sharing service, but you don't hear much about it these days.
TikTok apparently has over 40 million users in Japan lol.
What even is a "decent Japanese person" lmao
Background and Key Points
bilibili isn’t a new entrant to Japan so much as a name Japanese anime and Vtuber fans have already known for over a decade. Founded in 2009 (originally as “Mikufans”), it built its identity on danmaku, the scrolling bullet-comment overlay that floats across the video — a format it borrowed directly from Niconico’s own commenting system, which launched a few years earlier. That lineage is exactly what post #24 gestures at: the “original” (Niconico) stagnating while the platform that copied its signature feature became a Nasdaq-listed giant with heavy anime licensing deals and, notably, investment from Sony. Domestically in China, bilibili operates under strict real-name registration law, which makes the global app’s ID-free signup a deliberate carve-out for overseas users rather than a loosening of its home-market policy — a distinction the thread never raises.
The thread doesn’t really disagree about facts; it splits on how much a Chinese app’s origin should matter anymore. One camp treats it as a security and censorship risk (the Tiananmen-date jokes, the “wumao” suspicion, calls to block it outright). The other side, exemplified by the TikTok comparison in #74, points out that with 40 million-plus Japanese users already on a Chinese-owned app, treating “Chinese-made” as disqualifying is no longer realistic. A secondary, more substantive split is whether creators will actually migrate — hinging on real, dated YouTube policy changes (tighter monetization thresholds, view-counting changes from August 24) that the posters cite but the article itself doesn’t independently verify.
*This article is compiled from excerpts and a summary of the 5ch (Business News+) thread「[IT] Chinese Video Site “bilibili” Launches Global App — Japan Rollout Begins with Android」.
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