There are still a lot of dividends for short videos, but the first thing is to solve the problem of cash and copyright.

short videos have a lot of room to imagine the future, but under the tuyere, anxiety is also accompanied.

short videos began to develop in 2014 and broke out in 2016. Capital and giant horse racing enclosure, volcano Kuaishou and other unicorns appear, and short videos have become the darling of many Internet platforms overnight. At the same time, it has become the standard match of the global game. Douyin Kuaishou UC went out to sea, Youtube launched Youtube Go for India, and so on.

short videos have a lot of room to imagine the future, but under the tuyere, anxiety is also accompanied. Traffic, cash, copyright and other issues, how to solve these problems, will become the key node of the development of the entire video industry.

strong > short video industry / strong >

more than 50 years ago, Andy Warhol predicted that" in the future, everyone will be a celebrity for 15 minutes. " Because of the convenience of short video shooting, its production and popularity are far better than other content forms such as picture and text.

according to the 2017 Mobile Internet Autumn report released by QuestMoible, there are currently more than 100 independent APP of short videos, with more than 300 million industry users, double that of 2016. In the segment, the penetration rate of short video users ranks first. Through the deep cultivation of overseas markets, Alibaba's Tudou transformed short video APP Tudoo has also consumed more than 100 million videos a day in India and Indonesia, with an annual growth rate of more than 100 percent. As the local demographic dividend fades, short videos gradually become a global competition. Rising traffic data have also spurred capital to enter the game more unswervingly. In the second quarter of 2017 alone, 30 companies received investment and more than 50 investment institutions entered short videos.

internationally, as of June 2017, YouTube has more than 1.5 billion active users worldwide, using an average of more than one hour per year, basically dominated by short videos. Facebook's CEO clearly pointed out that in the future globalization of the world, the golden window of video has been opened, and the number of Instagram users has exceeded 200 million.

with the development of the short video industry, giants such as Ali, Jinri Toutiao, Tencent and other giants began to make intensive layouts and launch short videos, and began to invest 1 billion or 2 billion to support the development of PGC. A large number of users and producers also began to pour in. According to conservative estimates, no less than 300000 of PGC or individuals are engaged in the production of short videos. In the early days, PGC such as Papi sauce and big events seized the dividend of traffic, but with the development of the industry, PGC has also begun to reshuffle. In the November data of this year's new list, the one at the top of the list has become more vertical and professional content such as Xiaoling toys and bureau seat Zhang Zhaozhong.

with more and more entrants, the traffic dividend gradually fades, and the industry track is becoming more and more crowded, the problem of short video is also gradually exposed.

strong > short videos under the tuyere are full of problems / strong >

the short video industry is booming, with all kinds of capital and content entrepreneurs, producers such as crucian carp crossing the river.

but there are three big mountains that the whole industry and players have to face:

strong > Traffic / strong >: there has been a saying in the industry: 90% of the UGC with long tail contributes more than 90% of the content of the platform, while 10% of the head PGC harvests 90% of the traffic. One word reveals the "Matthew effect" of the industry. Under the current situation that the traffic cost is increasing day by day, the medium-long tail video team, how to reach the unattainable traffic cost, has become an urgent problem.

A small V of Weibo with 200000 fans, previously bought Weibo headlines for about 700 yuan, which only all fans could see, but in July, it suddenly increased fivefold to 3500 yuan. In other words, the basic promotion fee for 200000 fans per month is about 110000 yuan, which is only the cost of one channel. And the promotion cost of Wechat is even higher, and the promotion of large accounts like Mimeng has gone up in 600000.

strong > Cash out: / strong > Cash out has always been one of the biggest problems for content creators. Of the 952 high-quality short video teams targeted by the Beijing News, 47.9% have yet to make a profit, and 21.85% have only broken even. Under the tuyere of short video, only 30% of companies can make a profit.

second shift B+ round financing 100 million yuan, a C round financing of 40 million US dollars, these can raise hundreds of millions of funds of the team, are the head of the professional team, the founding team has accumulated in the media and Internet industry for more than 10 years, but even so, it has only achieved partial profits. And the small teams with the size of the well-known medium-long tail PGC are difficult to finance and have low income. At present, the cash mode of short video still does not break through the original advertising model, which is mainly maintained by platform subsidies, customized services, content placement, advertising cash and fan rewards.

strong > copyright: / strong > with the development of the Internet, especially the content industry, the copyright issue, which has been ignored before, has become increasingly important and become a pain point for the whole industry of short videos. On the one hand, due to the high cost and high demand of original video. As a result, the creators of short videos on many platforms transform the content for the second time by pinching the head to the tail, reprinting without permission, re-editing and other modes, seriously infringing upon the rights and interests of the creators. On the other hand, many businesses or creative teams need to use a certain material, but often can not find the original creator, risk or fluke use, often get into all kinds of trouble, including the law.

in February this year, the video work "A Day of mysterious Chinese electioneering leaders behind Trump" from the Arrow Factory, a team of the interface, applied for the country's first copyright registration for short videos, announcing that the short video industry has since ushered in an "era of rights protection." It is understood that the Arrow Factory decided to safeguard its rights because the work was cut off by others and uploaded to other platforms at the beginning and end of the film, and was downloaded and distributed without permission. The process is not easy.

strong > copyright is the key to industry upgrading / strong >

in the short video industry, the problem of infringement is increasingly rampant, which is actually driven by interests. In the article "number maker jianghu" mentioned: "pull 300,500 words from post bar, Weibo, Wechat, portal, modify, add your own" decoration "and" imagination ", and then post three pictures, take a title, and post. The whole process is no more than 10 minutes, and 20 articles are written every day. High-income earners can earn 10,000 yuan a month. " Although it is said that the picture and text, but the short video industry is also the case, as the platform continues to increase subsidies to users, so users also began to appear such quantity but not quality producers. In the long-term past, short video Bad money drives out good, the basic rights and interests of creators are not protected, then the rights and interests of the entire industry will become a great trauma, development and upgrading will become empty talk.

in China, short video rights protection institutions have not yet taken shape, coupled with the lack of domestic awareness of copyright protection. In the long run, only building a good content ecology is the basis for the sustainable development of the industry. Therefore, the protection and upgrading of copyright has become the key to the upgrading and development of the short video industry. With the great prosperity of short video content, from production to cash, only by creating a fair, just and open mechanism that can protect the value of the works from being destroyed can we have the motivation to continue to create. However, copyright protection, for most medium-and long-tail creators, high cost, long time, low income, most will be prohibitive, willing but powerless.

where there is a pain point, there is a demand, and various platforms are also strengthening the protection of copyright and the promotion of related modules. In order to protect the originality and reporting mechanism launched by Wechat, Alibaba recently launched a whale watch full-link digital copyright platform. Users can solve the problem of protecting their rights in the field of short video through technology, and at the same time establish a video material transaction ecology to help realize the content.

Whale Watch platform is equipped with Dharma iDST artificial intelligence technology, let video intelligent editing, and through the analysis of various dimensions of video content, put on more than 20,000 tags, and then use knowledge graph to catalog tags in multiple dimensions, so that the video can be automatically decomposed into short materials that can be retrieved and reused. At the same time, Ali also plans to launch a trading platform to provide better protection and cash for these materials.

in addition, some audio videos are often "cosmetic" after they are stolen. Based on this problem, while marking, intelligent editors will also extract "fingerprints" from audio and video materials to make audio and video materials traceable throughout the network. Fingerprint technology is helpful to video copyright monitoring and forensics, and greatly reduces the cost of forensics. At present, a 5-minute video can be completed within 10 seconds after the above-mentioned full-link processing. To a certain extent, the threshold for safeguarding rights has been greatly reduced.

through technical means, the dual problems of safeguarding rights and realizing cash have been solved. While maintaining copyright, help content creators to trade content and copyright, so as to enhance the value of content and copyright. The protection of rights is the foundation, and realization is the key. Through a platform, you can not only keep your own content, but also sell your own value. Thus form a complete content ecological chain, complement each other and promote the further upgrading and development of the short video industry.

overseas, due to the huge internal capacity, Youtube also uses mature technology to help musicians protect their rights. It is understood that Audiam, a software owned by Youtube, will sign contracts with musicians, and musicians will include their needs in protection contracts. After that, Audiam borrows Youtube's own content ID software to scan and troubleshoot videos on video sites to identify customers' works. When customers get what they want, Audiam gets a 25% commission.

in the United States, there is a famous saying about copyright, "anything new in the sun can be patented." Although it is of a teasing nature, the prosperity of American culture has something to do with the concept of copyright. In the field of domestic content entrepreneurship, only by solving the problem of copyright can we usher in real prosperity.

Edit: mary