China’s streaming gold rush moves into 2016 at full tilt, sweeping across every genre, carrying thousands of hours of U.S. content in its wake, and mirroring hyper-activity in the feature film production space.

In the two months between Mipcom in Cannes in October and the ATF in Singapore in December, North American distributors announced thousands of hours worth of licensing deals for China’s online platforms.

All that glitters may not be gold though. Although distributors say they’re getting real licensing money out of China, some say rates are still well below what they should be. The upside is some progress in the battle against piracy, although observers say illegal access is still rampant.

The new deals span genres, with a significant amount of kids programming heading for the mainland.

Canadian kids/family distributor DHX Media added 350 hours of library content to both LeTV and iQiyi in a deal announced in November. The iQiyi agreement includes non-exclusive AVOD and SVOD rights to more than 400 half-hours of content, including Teletubbies, Paddington and Caillou. LeTV acquired OTT TV (smart TV and set-top box) and web broadcast rights to 313 half-hours of Teletubbies in English and Mandarin.

DHX’s announcement came a little more than a month since Sesame Workshop started talking about its collaboration with three of China’s top digital platforms: Baidu’s iQiyi, Tencent Video, and Alibaba’s Tmall Box. Over the next two years, Sesame Workshop will provide the international version of its classic preschool show, Sesame Street, along with other spin-offs, dubbed in Mandarin, to all three platforms.

The deal with Tencent Video makes it the first video site in China to release Elmo the Musical. Tencent will also stream The Furchester Hotel, the 2014 co-production between Sesame Workshop and CBeebies; Sesame Street Seasons; and Let’s Celebrate Chinese New Year, a special co-produced with state-backed broadcaster China Central Television (CCTV). Sesame Workshop has also signed its first video streaming deal in the territory with BesTV, the largest IPTV platform in China.

The kids deals follow major licensing agreements between China’s powerful video platforms and U.S. studios.

In November, CBS Studios International and PPTV signed an exclusive, multi-year licensing agreement for streaming rights to CBS and Showtime series in China. The new deal provides PPTV’s 400 million users with access to current hit shows and exclusive premieres in China of selected new series from both CBC and Showtime. Titles or number of hours involved were not disclosed. CBS has also not said what the streaming release window is.

Paramount Pictures, meanwhile, seems to have hit paydirt in an exclusive TVOD/SVOD movie deal with Tencent Video for new movie releases – including Star Trek Beyond – in China. The deal kicks off in April 2016 and covers Paramount feature films for 12 months after their theatrical release. Tencent will also offer Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows and Jack Reacher: Never Go Back. Recent box office releases include Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation and Terminator Genisys.

Tencent’s Paramount deal runs alongside its acquisition of the complete 007 series in an online rights deal with MGM. The official announcement stopped short of using the word “exclusive”, but said that Tencent would be “the only China internet company providing the 007 titles online to China’s vast movie fan base”. The movies and a slate of related video will be offered on a TVOD and SVOD basis. New Bond movie, Spectre, will be added to the Tencent deal “in the future”.

Sony Pictures Television steps onto the field with an extension to its film licensing agreement with iQiyi. The multi-year deal covers SVOD rights to an undisclosed hundreds of Sony Pictures titles a year, including Men In Black and Spider-Man trilogies. The deal also gives iQiyi VOD rights to the studio’s current film slate, including Pixels, The Walk and Goosebumps.

iQiyi senior vice president, Xianghua Yang, said the platform’s cooperation with major global studios meets “growing demand and helps prevent online piracy”.

This article first appeared in ContentAsia Issue 6, 2015, published in November 2015.