Chinese drama availability research for studios, distributors, licensors, and platforms. Compare services, episode access, subtitle and dub languages, and demand signals by title and country.
Request a distribution and demand report, or access to the licensing view. Email [email protected] with your titles and countries. We will confirm the available coverage and any further research needed.
We check how Chinese dramas are distributed overseas and what viewers can access in each country.
If you are a Chinese studio or distributor, you know what you licensed and to whom. You may not know which of those routes a foreign viewer can actually reach today, which have quietly stopped resolving, or what your own catalog looks like to someone searching in English, Portuguese or Indonesian.
If you are a Western licensor or platform, you know what you want to acquire. Our checks help you compare existing streaming options in a territory and see when each listing was last verified.
The same title-by-country records support both distribution reviews and acquisition research.
Each report compares demand signals with the streaming options already available for one title in one country.
Demand and availability are reported separately. A popular title may already have extensive distribution. Performance in China provides additional context.
The report does not estimate rights prices or confirm rights availability. We do not have deal prices or contracts; finding no streaming option does not establish that rights are available.
| Case | Demand | Market | What is open |
|---|---|---|---|
| Served Pursuit of Jade 逐玉 all five countries | Strong. In the United States its search interest over the year averaged about six and a half times that of The Untamed. 86,093 following on MyDramaList. | Served by its own platforms: the full run free on YouTube with local-language subtitles, and a local dub, in every one of the five. | Additional placement may be worth assessing; local-language options already exist. |
| Possible gap Hidden Love 偷偷藏不住 Brazil | Strong following: 170,286 on MyDramaList, the largest of any title we track. Search interest in Brazil: 11 (Vietnam = 100, past twelve months), level with Mexico (11) and the United States (9), and steady all year. | Netflix has all 25 episodes, by subscription, with Portuguese subtitles. Youku has two episodes free, with Portuguese subtitles. One free full run on YouTube, with English subtitles only. No Portuguese dub on any of them. | Portuguese subtitles exist, but the full run in Portuguese is behind a subscription. Open: a free full run in Portuguese, or a Portuguese dub. |
| Upcoming Chasing Dreams 梦花廷 | No record yet. Signals: 11,677 following before release, the most of the five upcoming titles we track. Its lead, Chen Zheyuan, also led Hidden Love. | Not released. WeTV has a page for it with a trailer. | Release terms and country availability need checking when episodes premiere. |
| Country | Search interest (Vietnam = 100) | Already carrying it | In the local language |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vietnam | 100 | iQIYI (two episodes free); YouTube, free in full | Vietnamese subtitles on both; a Vietnamese-dubbed edition on iQIYI |
| Indonesia | 14 | iQIYI and WeTV (two episodes free on each); YouTube, free in full | Indonesian subtitles on all three; an Indonesian dub on iQIYI |
| United States | 6 | Netflix; iQIYI and WeTV (two episodes free on each); YouTube, free in full | English subtitles on all four; an English-dubbed edition on WeTV |
| Brazil | 3 | Netflix; iQIYI and WeTV (two episodes free on each); YouTube, free in full | Portuguese subtitles on all four; a Portuguese dub on iQIYI |
| Mexico | 3 | Netflix; iQIYI and WeTV (two episodes free on each); YouTube, free in full | Spanish subtitles on all four; a Spanish dub on iQIYI |
Search interest is Google Trends for the past twelve months, with Vietnam, the strongest of the five, set to 100. It measures how large the title looms in a country’s searches, not how many people searched, and the small figures are coarse. Searches peaked in the weeks of 15 and 22 March 2026; six months later, when we checked, the free local-language run was in place in all five. Not yet read: WeTV and Netflix in Vietnam, Netflix in Indonesia.
What the three cases show. A hit is quickly served by its own platforms, so for a third party the opening is before release or in the gaps: an older title with a following and no free run in the local language.
The public pages start from a viewer in one country. The licensing view starts from the title: every country we have checked, the services carrying it there and on what terms, whether it has local-language subtitles and a local dub, how it does at home (its Douban score, the platform that premiered it, and that platform’s own heat figures where it publishes them), and the unlicensed copies we have recorded, with where we saw them. Services listed by TMDB and JustWatch that we have not yet opened are shown apart, marked “Lead, not confirmed”.
It is behind a password. Open the licensing view. No password? Email [email protected] to discuss distribution data and trends.
Short-drama apps took roughly US$750 million in in-app purchases worldwide in the first quarter of 2026, up about 20% on the year, on more than 850 million downloads, up 140%. Southeast Asia, Latin America and India made up over three quarters of those downloads. That is Sensor Tower’s estimate, built from App Store and Google Play data.1 A Chinese industry body puts China’s own overseas micro-drama revenue at about US$1.5 billion for January to August 2025, close to triple the year before.2
That is a different product from the forty-episode dramas catalogued here. It shows that Chinese serialized fiction has paying audiences and working distribution in the regions this site covers. It does not size the long-form market.
The sources cited here do not provide a separate estimate for overseas long-form Chinese drama. iQIYI, one of the three big Chinese drama platforms and listed in the United States, reported no overseas figure at all for the second quarter of 2026. Its results give total revenues of RMB 6.29 billion (US$926.6 million) and membership revenue of RMB 4.01 billion (US$591.6 million), with no geographic breakdown: no segment, no subscriber count.3
Korean television went overseas through partnerships with platforms like Netflix. Chinese television went out through its own streaming platforms, which built their own footprints, starting in Southeast Asia.4
Our count shows the result. The same title sits on a Chinese platform’s own service, on Viki or Netflix, and on a YouTube channel at the same time, and differently in every country. The counts are in News.
An aggregator will show you a platform’s logo. It does not tell you whether that platform will play the show in your country, in which languages, or how much of it is free. Among the aggregator listings we opened in the United States this month, one title’s page read unavailable, one had a page with nothing to play, and one had a single episode.
China’s cinemas took 51.8 billion yuan, about US$7.4 billion, in 2025, up nearly 22% on the year, and 79.67% of that went to domestic films. One animated feature, Ne Zha 2, drew 324 million admissions and close to a third of the year’s takings.5
Our research focuses on where Chinese titles are available overseas.
The name is the form. A Chinese drama is not a twelve-part season. It is one continuous story told across dozens of episodes, written and shot as a single unit and released daily or in blocks.
Across the 65 dramas here with a confirmed episode count, the median is 33 episodes and the mean 37; just under two thirds fall between 30 and 50, and the range runs from 12 to 76. Forty is the round number the form is known by, not a measured average, based on the format rather than the average of our current selection.
A viewer deciding whether to start one is committing a working week. Whether a licensed route exists in their country, and whether it carries subtitles they can read, is the whole decision.
This dataset covers selected titles and services; it does not estimate the size of the whole market.
330 routes on record across 81 titles and 23 services. Five countries are checked from inside: the United States, Brazil, Indonesia, Vietnam and Mexico. 263 of the 330 routes are in those five. Eleven more countries are listed and not yet checked, and the site says so on each of them.
Every route is read on the platform itself, by a person, on a date that is recorded. Nothing is taken from an aggregator without being opened on the platform.
Vietnam has 18 titles not yet checked; Brazil, Indonesia and Mexico have four each. Netflix has been read in the United States and in part in Mexico, and not yet in Brazil, Indonesia or Vietnam. 66 of the 330 routes have no subtitle reading yet. None of these is shown as an absence.
How quickly listings change. We have not yet measured this. A first pass over a country finds error that was already sitting there. Decay is what the second pass over the same routes finds.
We began keeping a record of every change on 19 September 2026. Its first entry is small and exactly the kind of thing that vanishes: WeTV’s free window on one title moved from five free episodes to four, mid-run. The record now holds about 2,900 entries. A route checked once is a fact about one day. The same route checked again is the beginning of a rate: how long a listing stays true, which services move their catalogs and which leave them alone.
Every route is opened by a person on a recorded date, from inside the country it is listed for. Where nothing has been checked, the site says so. The full method is published: Research Methodology.