I want to compare a couple of paid streaming services for how efficient they are for learning Chinese. I plan to compare some of the more common streaming services including: Amazon Prime Video, Netflix, and Sling. I will skip Hulu for my comparison as I have not had a subscription, though I will add a bit about what I’ve heard. Youtube will also be mentioned (because even though it isn’t necessarily paid for most use cases, it’s definitely a good resource for a lot of content), as well as the issues with using Youtube. For the sake of this article, I am going to assume you’re located in the US (simply because I can’t write to anywhere outside the US or China for services), and I’m not going to include hopping the Great Firewall and using Chinese streaming sites, or any of the weird streaming sites which fly by night.
My criteria are: quantity of content, quality of content, variety of content, and subtitle availability. Quantity of content is pretty self-explanatory, we want to see if there is enough content to even justify using it for this purpose. Quality isn’t going to be a subjective comparison of genres but more along the line of audio and video quality, as well as quality of the materials for language material from an accessibility and linguistic perspective. Variety of content details whether or not we have a selection, or just a bunch of one genre or similar. Subtitles are extremely important on this front, and I will address whether we have Mandarin subtitles.
Amazon Prime Video
Amazon Prime Video has a huge selection and tends to have a good mix of movies and TV shows for English media. The Chinese selection is extremely diverse and there is a huge variety of what is available with Prime Video as well as a sizable quantity. Quality is definitely up there as well, though there is a pretty heavy bias to period pieces for shows (so a lot of pseudo-literary and literary language). The audio and video quality is pretty much on point with what you would get from a DVD or similar at minimum, though this is near becoming a moot point anymore (aside from on less commonly used streaming sites and free sites).
I would argue that Amazon Prime Video has the largest selection by far of Chinese language movies out of any of the 3 services. It does lose some points since the subtitles seem to be English only unless the movie was hard-subbed (though I haven’t seen any of those in ages on the service). There are also a lot of extremely relevant documentaries and other types of content that you won’t find on most other paid services in the US.
One thing to note is that some shows on Prime Video only have a subset of episodes or even just a few episodes. This tends to be pretty common with Asian media on these services for whatever reason. The content doesn’t fluctuate near as much as something like Netflix either so you can expect material to be on there for a bit. Prime also has the issue of being pretty hard to search for on apps from my experience.
Netflix
Netflix has a selection of Chinese shows and a smattering of movies, but also includes some originals or exclusives (on US based streaming services at least) like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny and a Wandering Earth. There is a large quantity of shows and the quality tends to be really good, though I have bumped into a few shows where it feels the audio and video quality are a bit lacking compared to the rest of the catalog (though never the Netflix Originals at least). Some of these may be due to recording or encoding issues on the originals, but there are at least a few which appear to be specific to Netflix. They are by no means common though.
The shows tend to feel a bit more samey to me, and the app is hard to search on, even though the desktop client has no real issues there. The shows feel a bit samey to me and tend to be either period pieces or standard soap opera affairs. The movies have a good bit of variety, but if you don’t like either of these genres, finding a show is hard. I noted a lack of older shows as well which I didn’t notice with Amazon Prime (though it was there) which seems to be related to the organization really highlighting the categories available (Emotional Chinese TV Shows, Emotional Chinese TV Dramas, Emotional Asian TV Shows, Romantic Chinese TV Dramas, etc.).
The thing that really sets Netflix apart from the other streaming services is the fact that it has subtitles in simplified characters or traditional characters for most Chinese shows or movies. This is a massive boon for advanced learners (period pieces basically need subtitles in my opinion for some of the references unless you’re really, really familiar with literary Chinese) or even newer learners looking to avoid relying on the crutch of English subtitles. The subtitles also render extremely well and some shows may not have simplified subtitles, but at least have traditional so you aren’t just locked into English.
Shows tend to be complete on Netflix and there are a number of movies, but I have found a few flaws with searching for this content via app (though the desktop search is really good) and the content on Netflix is here today, gone tomorrow as a whole. If Netflix were a bit more reliable for content and it didn’t still feel like “What should I watch?” due to the sameness of the shows any time I opened it, it would easily beat the rest by leagues. Unfortunately, just like trying to watch a movie on Netflix, I spend most of time looking for something rather than just watching.
Sling TV
Sling TV is the service I wanted to love the most out of all of these. I tend to view modern Chinese TV as a mix of soap operas, period pieces, and period soap operas for 90% of the material on Mainland and Taiwanese TV. Watching modern Chinese TV is like pulling teeth at best for me, except for maintaining language skills. Having something live where you just tune in for a bit and don’t feel obliged to really keep track of seemed like the best thing ever.
Sling TV has a good selection of different stations with live broadcasts and has a few shows on demand. The issue I ran into with this is that the stations were synced with local time from their broadcast point while the guide was synced locally, and the shows on demand were shared by the entire package. That means that you are seeing late night TV during the day, and daytime TV at night, and unless you know the schedule of the station in China, you have no idea what you’re watching from the guide.
You also get news, advertisements (which is usually a huge black mark against a streaming services but can add some novelty with language learning), random content you wouldn’t see on a show stream, etc. Subtitles may be baked in depending on the stream so you don’t have to worry about it looking like anything different than a Chinese TV station. The idea was great, but the implementation was awful unfortunately, unlike most of Sling’s offerings (assuming you know you’re getting basically live TV over the internet with some added on-demand content).
Other Options
Some people turn to Hulu or Youtube instead of the above. I’ve heard Hulu is basically somewhere between Prime and Netflix for the catalog, but more like Prime for the limitations. I really don’t like Hulu on principle, so I haven’t spent much time delving. If someone is more knowledgeable about Hulu and can tell me how it compares to the others, I’d love to know.
Youtube is a very much mixed bag due to several factors. The biggest one is that many shows are pirated. You may not care, but this can be a bit of a deal breaker for some. The issue with these is that the content creator isn’t getting money and a lot of the streams are going to get taken down or use measures to make the content filter unable to track it which will ruin the quality (like pitch shifting, weird boxes, randomly inserted clips of other video, etc.).
Youtube definitely offers some great content straight from the makers, however. News is easy to find and plenty of stations go ahead and stream their shows complete with Chinese subtitles. You can find plenty of other content as well, both legally and not, but there really isn’t a rhyme or a reason to the order or availability, some of the content is awful quality even if legally available, and some devices don’t support Youtube well (for TV streaming media boxes). I would say the legally available content has a catalog around that of Prime or similar, but you really have to know how to find it.
Conclusion
If you’re going to pick one of these paid services, Netflix probably wins simply by virtue of the subtitles and the catalog being decent. In terms of content, Amazon Prime probably wins for variety and quantity for movies even though it is a bit lacking for shows, while Netflix wins for quantity for shows. Sling is not even a contender at all and while I like it as a service, I ended up canceling all of the Chinese language add-ons due to how limited it is. Youtube is definitely a great source for content, but some of the content can be lacking or illegal, and the paid services are definitely more reliable for consistency, though Youtube does offer some content none of the others do and makes a great free resource.