Forty Episodes
← Back to the guide

Research Methodology研究方法

How a route gets onto this site, what each mark on it means, how a title gets on the list, and where the data comes from.

We check listings against the platforms and record the date and source. Availability can change between checks. Our process follows three rules:

How a route is checked

A route is one platform carrying one title in one country. It goes on the site only after a person has opened it.

Availability states

Each title has an availability status for the selected country: a licensed route exists here; we looked and found none; nobody has checked yet. Unchecked titles are marked “Not checked yet”. Upcoming titles are marked separately: a platform page or trailer does not mean episodes are available.

Who made the subtitles

A subtitle or dub track can come from the platform, from its audience, or from a machine. Over thirty-odd hours of court titles and kinship terms, the difference decides whether a show is watchable.

Where a platform itself labels a track as machine-made, we carry the label: a language shown as Portuguese (AI) is one the platform called machine-made. Today those labels come from iQIYI, Youku, YouTube and Prime Video. A language shown plainly means only that nobody flagged it. It is not a claim that a person made it.

How a title gets on the list

The list is not a catalog of everything. Since October 2026 a title is added for one of three reasons, and never because a platform happens to carry it.

What never adds a title: being available somewhere. If titles joined the list because a service carries them, that service’s share of the list would rise by construction, and every count on this site would be measuring our own selection.

Titles added before the rule was written were the editor’s selection. Every title, once added, is checked in every country the site covers.

Scope, numbers and sources

What this site does not do

We list legitimate, licensed routes only. Where a drama is not licensed in your region we say so plainly, rather than routing you around the restriction. We do not publish instructions for circumventing territorial licensing, and we do not link to unofficial upload sites. Where a platform is genuinely closed to overseas viewers, the honest answer is more useful than a workaround.

On the numbers

The numbers in our licensing readings do not count viewers. Search interest is Google Trends for one country over the past twelve months. It shows how large a title looms in that country’s searches, set against another country or another title; it is relative, and small figures are coarse. Following is the number of MyDramaList users who have put the title on a list. It is one worldwide figure and it accumulates, so older titles and romance run high. 热度 is each platform’s own composite of plays, searches and interactions. Its formulas are proprietary and a figure from one platform cannot be compared with a figure from another, so where we cite it we cite it against that platform’s own benchmark.

What is checked, and where the data comes from

The country selector lists countries with published checks. In the coverage section, solid boxes mark those countries; dashed boxes mark countries whose checks are not yet published. Individual titles may have recorded findings before a country is available to browse. As of 4 October 2026 the checked countries are the United States, Brazil, Indonesia, Vietnam and Mexico. In Vietnam we have not yet been able to read WeTV, Mango or Netflix; shows that depend on them are marked “Not checked yet”, and the amber number on a country’s box counts them.

Routes are read from each platform’s own page. Some were first found through JustWatch and then confirmed on the platform itself.

Posters and series data come from TMDB. This product uses the TMDB API but is not endorsed or certified by TMDB.

On the globe, China marks where a title comes from and the lines run to the countries where we list a licensed route for it. The map itself is drawn from Natural Earth data, by way of the world-atlas project.

Search accepts traditional Chinese characters by way of the OpenCC character table (Apache License 2.0).