To promote membership, capital alliance, open cooperation, how does the video platform compete in the new world of Internet TV?

when the melee between video platforms and hardware companies ends, the remaining players may form different groups to form an oligopoly in the field of Internet TV.

"No matter how strong an enterprise is, if he is fighting alone, his foundation is weak." If an ecosystem of common interests is formed around him, then the strength of this ecosystem will protect him and nourish him, making that enterprise a better enterprise and more capable of long-term and healthy development. " Gong Yu, founder of iqiyi and CEO.

iqiyi, Youku Tudou, and Tencent are all trying to make themselves non-negligible players in the field of Internet TV, hoping to build a community of interests with themselves as the core, including content, license, capital, and hardware. to find the best combination of "focused content" and "open layout".

when the melee between video platforms and hardware companies ends, the remaining players may form different groups and form an oligopoly in the field of Internet TV.

< strong > Video platform alliance Internet TV < / strong >

on September 13, 2016, iqiyi and Skyworth announced a strategic cooperation. Iqiyi will invest 150 million yuan in Skyworth's Internet TV brand Cookai, accounting for 5% of the shares. And from the next fiscal year, Skyworth's Internet TV will preset VIP membership services and related content through the Galaxy Internet TV integrated broadcast and control platform. Skyworth has become an important part of the interest community in Gong Yu's mouth.

in 2013, iqiyi worked with TCL to launch TCL iqiyi TV+ TV, with iqiyi responsible for video playback and TCL responsible for design, production and manufacturing. Later, TCL cooperated with Tencent to continue to try TV+.

and this time, iqiyi's partner Skyworth also signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Tencent and China Internet TV, a licensee, announcing that they would join hands to create a Geek Life ecosystem. Youku Tudou, who already belongs to Ali, held hands with Konka in the early days to provide video software services for its Internet TV, and exclusively implanted Youku TV APP functions and services into Konka's full range of products.

"in the battlefield of the home Internet, both traditional home appliance manufacturers and Internet enterprises have gene deficiencies that cannot be made up in a short period of time. Only by cooperating can we quickly occupy this field." Gong Yu said. Embedding the content and services of the video platform into the products of hardware manufacturers can help traditional manufacturers to make up for the shortcomings of content and services.

"neither the content nor the distribution platform, the user's account is not in his own hand, nor does he interact with the user." Storm TV CEO Liu Yaoping believes that it is difficult for traditional enterprises with hardware as the core to make a breakthrough in content. Video platforms often do not want to share the profits of both hardware and software. Entering the living room through the TV terminal to find new growth points of member income and advertising business is the purpose of the video platform, at the same time, it can also subsidize the hardware through advertising and the sharing of member income.

the combination of video platform and traditional hardware enterprises has become an important mode of resource integration for Internet TV. Both Tencent and iqiyi have chosen to cooperate openly with major manufacturers. Through continuous cooperation and attempt, choose mutually recognized competitors, from simple brand and market cooperation to deeper strategic and capital cooperation. In this running-in process, to establish a stronger alliance, in order to confront the all-ecological chain Internet TV model represented by Letv.

in addition to iqiyi's investment in Skyworth's Cookai brand, Huanwang Technology, an intelligent TV operation platform owned by TCL, signed a capital increase agreement in 2015, formally introducing Tencent Investment as a strategic investor. After Ali completed the privatization of the all-in-one Group, Youku's OTT business is also being seamlessly connected with Ali's cloud OS, Tmall magic box and other businesses.

"We will certainly deepen our cooperation with mainstream partners with capital relations, because the establishment of this sense of trust is very important, from simple business to in-depth cooperation at the capital level. In promoting product innovation and the integration of technology software and hardware, if we can let go of all the baggage, we will have more innovation in the future." Yang Dongwen, executive director of Skyworth Digital Holdings Co., Ltd., CEO, president of Skyworth Group Co., Ltd.

"We are not only a vertical and deep strategic cooperation, but also an open cooperation in various forms." For example, we focus on our television, iqiyi focuses on his content provision, our upstream and downstream is a vertical strategic cooperation, I think such a division of labor vertical strategic cooperation should be the development direction of an industry. "

< strong > the new world of video platforms < / strong >

after more than a decade of melee, the pattern of video platforms has been fixed and the room for growth is limited. Internet TV and home entertainment have enabled video platforms with content advantages to find a new world. After PC Internet and Mobile Internet, living room Internet provides a new space for content output and business value-added of video platform. The war on video platforms will continue to the field of Internet TV.

data from iResearch show that in July 2016, iqiyi had 360 million PC users and 330 million monthly app users, making it the third largest mobile app in China. For the video platform, the competition between PC Internet and mobile Internet has changed from the incremental market competition of ordinary users to the stock market competition of pursuing the number of paid members.

China's color TV industry is also experiencing growth difficulties. According to the "Market inventory and trend Forecast of China's Color TV Industry in the first half of 2016" released by Oviyun, the retail volume of China's color TV market reached 23.51 million units in the first half of 2016, an increase of 6.9 percent, but the overall industry retail sales were 71 billion yuan, down 4.0 percent from the same period last year. Internet companies do television to lower the overall price level of the industry, but also make Internet TV become the key to compete for the stock market.

Chang Jiang, vice president of Juli Media, said, "at present, there are nearly 700 million PC and mobile users in China, but only 100 million smart TV terminals. There are 400 million televisions in Chinese households, of which 300 million are not smart televisions, which shows that the market is extremely huge, not to mention that there are only a few 30 million of the real operable terminals among the only 100 million smart TV terminals."

while the established household appliance enterprises speed up the pace of new technology and design, content and service will also become the common goal of new and old TV manufacturers. Feng Xin, CEO of Storm TV, said at a press conference of Storm TV that the next decade will be the stage of rapid development of Internet TV in China. It is expected that 300 million households will use Internet TV by 2025, and the functions of Internet TV will gradually be diversified to integrate social networking, gaming, VR, shopping and payment into a home Internet application platform.

coincidence lies in that the complementary advantages of video platforms and traditional household appliance enterprises can have a greater chance to break the difficulties faced by both sides. The crux of the problem is that whoever controls the higher quality content experience and the better hardware experience will be favored by more users and thus gain more market share, that is, the sales of TV sets and the number of members of the video platform. In the case of similar technical level, the two tend to merge into one, forming the situation that television is a member and a member is television.

another reason for this is that video platforms are beginning to differentiate more from TV stations in terms of content. First of all, the pressure of copyright competition has prompted the video platform to invest in the production of richer homemade content, and the tentacles of the video platform have been extended to the field of content production. At the same time, the quality of self-made content has also been greatly improved, with the popularity of self-made content such as "grave robbing notes", "remaining sin", "unintentional mage" and "promotion of the crown princess", and even a variety of online backstage broadcasting methods have appeared.

the existence of these advantages provides the strength for the video platform to expand the paid member business on Internet TV. "the focus of this cooperation is more related to the current development stage of the video industry, that is, members, in addition to those basic free content, more is the services of members." Gong Yu said that this is the difference between this cooperation with Skyworth and the previous cooperation.

through Tencent's QQ account system, Penguin TV, an overall software solution for Internet TV and intelligent set-top boxes, launched by Tencent in January 2016, can connect TV, PC and mobile. At the same time, it also launched Tencent Super Film and TV VIP in April, which integrates all the rights and interests of Tencent Video's members in TV, PC and mobile, and provides full-screen membership privileges to users at a more cost-effective price. After Youku and Ali achieve data access, their membership rights and interests are bound to be universal in Yun OS, Tmall Magic Box, Youku TV and other channels.

encircle as many members as possible, which has become the main goal of the video platform in the stock competition. When the integration of content and service becomes a trend, TV users trained by cable TV and digital TV will have a stronger willingness to pay for the more and more rich content and services that the video platform integrates into Internet TV. Internet TV may have more fierce competition in the future.

< strong > the group fight of Internet TV has just begun < / strong >

"maybe it used to be called scuffle, but now it's called scuffle, but it's not clear. It's a gang fight. Now gradually enter a higher level of transition stage, enter the group fighting stage, and finally oligarchy competition. There may still be a direction for development, and at least the competition has reached such a stage. " Yang Dongwen described the current stage of competition in this way.

TV manufacturers need to form alliances with different video platforms to produce content and service differentiation, but the video platform has not shown much differentiation at present. For TV manufacturers and video platforms focused on content and services, the relationship between them has not been finally stabilized. Although the cooperation of capital is deeper than that of the market, it is not exclusive.

"our strategic direction is an open ecosystem. We are broadening it, broadening it at the level of video media platform, accommodating more content providers upstream and allowing more users to use as many devices as possible to access iqiyi's content downstream. We are open cooperation with terminal manufacturers and will not do some kind of exclusive cooperation. " Gong Yu said.

as a partner of iqiyi, Skyworth also works with Mango TV. TCL, which has partnered with Tencent and iqiyi, married Letv not long ago. Letv, a holding subsidiary of TCL Multimedia and Leeco, signed a new subscription agreement. Letv, through Letv Zhixin's wholly-owned subsidiary in Hong Kong, made a new investment of 2.267 billion Hong Kong dollars (about 1.875 billion yuan) and subscribed for 348.85 million new shares of TCL Multimedia at HK $6.50 per share.

"in fact, there have been some catfish in this industry in the past two years. Although its market share can not compete with traditional terminal manufacturers, its model, impact, and impact, whether positive or negative, have a far-reaching impact on the industry." Gong Yu said iqiyi tried to counter the ecological chain model represented by Letv through non-exclusive cooperation, but now it doesn't seem to be a safer way.

Internet TV must be exclusive when it enters the oligarchic era, and the way of content integration is the same as that of traditional TV and TV stations, which cannot guarantee the persistence and loyalty of its members, and does not meet the interests and needs of the video platform. This Internet TV group fight has just begun, after a fight, it can finally form a stable interest community and become the oligarch in control of Internet TV.

Edit: yvonne