The company said Liu has stepped down for "undisclosed personal reasons", but industry sources reveal that recent mergers and acquisitions in the online video industry have put Tencent Video at risk of being marginalised, which has in turn placed pressure on Liu.
Youku Tudou is the result of a 2012 merger that has created China's biggest video site. In May this year, Baidu acquired internet video provider PPS. Rumours of Sohu's impending acquisition of PPTV has also been widely circulated, feeding into further consolidation of the online video industry.
Tencent is considered a late entrant into the online video field as it only started investing in internet bandwidth, servers and video content around March 2011, a time when Youku and Tudou were already making final preparations to get listed on the Nasdaq.
It is understood that Liu has chosen to become an entrepreneur after leaving Tencent. Liu joined Tencent in 2004 as general manager of its e-commerce, enterprise development and strategy development departments, before taking charge of the online video division in April 2011.
His successor, Sun, vice-president of Tencent, has been with the company since July 2003 and has been responsible for the portal's content operation and administration. He declined to be interviewed by Campaign Asia-Pacific.
Tencent's online video strategy for 2013 is to build a pan-entertainment video platform integrating the concept of 'big data'.
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