7 predictions about live streaming

Live streaming is a stopover on the journey from the past to the future.

In the past, it was text, pictures, audio, and video, and in the future it will be VR and AR, with live streaming happening to be stuck in the middle.

Live streaming is like an ape-man. It still carries the wild blood of the past, but has the intelligence of higher creatures.

It is easy for us to understand apes, and it is also easy for us to understand humans, but it is a bit ridiculous for us to understand "ape-men".

Instead of focusing on the current live broadcast, we might as well look further and talk about the live broadcast of the future.

I will talk about some somewhat "scary" judgments, such as:

• The virtual anchors of the future may not necessarily be “virtual”;
• Live streaming may undermine brand marketing theory;
• The most powerful MCNs in the future will not recruit anchors at all;
• "Cloud economy" will not only change the economy, but also change human behavioral ethics.

I will "imagine" the seven futures of the live broadcast. Predicting the future is not to accurately judge the future, but to help us better correct the present.

Today, let’s digest this concept together - live broadcast.

Prediction 1: 24-hour live shopping guide

Why has e-commerce live streaming risen so quickly? Because the order conversion rate is high.

Taking women's clothing as an example, the average conversion rate of women's clothing pictures and texts is 6.6%, while the conversion rate of women's clothing live broadcasts is as high as 21.2%. (Data from "Social E-commerce | Women's Clothing Industry Report");

The jade industry is even more exaggerated. In 2018, China's online jade transactions reached 130 billion yuan, of which live streaming sales accounted for 87%!

It can be said that without live streaming, there would be no jade e-commerce. (Data from "2018 China Jade Industry Online Consumption White Paper")

The trend of all businesses is to maximize our operating efficiency, and the nature of all businessmen is to maximize their own interests.

Since the conversion rate of live streaming is so high, the means to maximize operational efficiency is to sell goods through 24-hour live streaming. That is, customers can enter the live streaming room at any time and communicate with the anchor in real time to understand all the details of the product.

When 24-hour live shopping guides appear, merchants will immediately discover another problem: some anchors have a high order conversion rate when they act as shopping guides.

Some anchors have low order conversion rates when acting as shopping guides.

For example, when the CEO attends the live broadcast, the effect on that day is better; when the celebrity who endorses the product attends the live broadcast, the conversion rate is even more gratifying.

Among the company’s army of anchors, some celebrity shopping guides may bring in 5 to 10 times more goods than ordinary shopping guides!

I have said: The trend of all businesses is to maximize our operating efficiency, and the nature of all businessmen is to maximize their own interests.

In pursuit of ultimate efficiency and profits, companies will ponder a question: How to make every live broadcast as awesome as the arrival of the CEO, a celebrity drop-in, or a celebrity shopping guide like Li Jiaqi?

It is impossible for CEOs and celebrities to stay in the live broadcast room for 24 hours. Star shopping guides in companies are also rare. An anchor who can work passionately and without fatigue for 24 hours is not a real anchor, but a virtual anchor.

Prophecy 2: Virtual anchors with thousands of faces

When you mention virtual anchors, the picture in your mind may be like this:

Indeed, anchors like Hatsune Miku are the favorites of otakus, but the two-dimensional world is only a niche group. The anchors of the future are most likely to be virtual real-life images rather than virtual two-dimensional characters.

We may use spokespersons like this in the future. For example, Hu Ge is the spokesperson for Huawei mobile phones. The endorsement contract signed by Huawei and Hu Ge has an important authorization, which is that Hu Ge’s image and voice are authorized to the company to synthesize virtual characters.

Imagine that when you enter Huawei's Tmall store and want to buy a flagship phone, the host who interacts with you live is not Huawei's shopping guide but Hu Ge! Even if a girl knows that this Hu Ge is fake, she will still place an order without hesitation under the smiling offensive of "Hu Ge".

Since the spokesperson can be virtually synthesized, the CEO is even easier to create. Because the girl was seduced by the fake Hu Ge, Mr. Lei Jun might voluntarily donate his facial recognition system and voice recognition system, allowing himself to be Xiaomi's 24-hour rotating anchor.

Don’t think that this day is far away. During the Taobao Maker Festival in September 2019, iFLYTEK released a live broadcast video of Li Jiaqi synthesized using AI technology.

AI technology can not only easily replace accountants, waiters, and doctors, but it can also easily poach talents from professions such as anchors. Moreover, the virtual anchors of the future will be so real that ordinary people will not be able to tell the difference.

When virtual anchors become popular, we immediately discover another problem: although we can combine celebrities, CEOs, and super shopping guides into virtual anchors and use them unlimited times, there are still big differences in order conversion rates.

Let’s take Hu Ge as an example. Huawei may have discovered that most customers would choose to place an order quickly when they see Hu Ge passionately promoting mobile phones. But there are always some people who are not impressed by Hu Ge.

Therefore, it is easy for us to think of a solution, which is to let different customers see different anchors, which is the "one thousand faces for one thousand people" version of the live shopping guide.

In the future, merchants will use virtual synthesis technology to generate countless anchors, and push different anchors to each store visitor based on his or her personality and preferences.

• If you are a 2D otaku, you can be entertained by 2D anchors like Hatsune Miku;
• If you are a hardcore straight man in technology, you can use CEO to talk to you about parameters;
• For the fans, I will introduce the phone to you while dancing with the faces of the girls from Youth With You;

Moreover, these virtual anchors are likely to change dynamically. When a user enters a live streaming platform, we can judge the user’s current mood based on his browsing habits, purchase records, comments and likes in the past month, and randomly generate a virtual anchor that suits his current mood.

For example, if big data detects that you may have recently broken up, the anchor may start a chat service and reach a product transaction through emotional comfort...

In the future, the anchor that everyone sees at every moment can be different. This means not just “a thousand faces for a thousand people”, but “a thousand faces for a thousand people at a thousand times”.

Prediction 3: MCN competition will shift from resource competition, ecological chain competition, positioning competition to technology competition

According to statistics, there are 14,500 MCN companies in the country. The market certainly cannot accommodate so many players. The elimination competition between MCNs will go through the following stages:

Resource PK, ecological chain PK, positioning PK, and technology PK.

1. Resource PK

The current competition between MCNs remains on the surface - the competition for top anchor resources.

However, most MCNs have very little control over top anchors, especially domestic top anchors, many of whom are independent. The reason is simple. The value that most MCNs can provide to top anchors is too limited.

The so-called business brokerage is to connect with the merchants found from the account background first, and then transfer them to the anchor;

The so-called product selection and supply chain means sending a few people to the merchant's factory to take a look and talk to the merchant;

The so-called traffic support is even more ridiculous. It means to buy some promotional space with money, and negotiate with the platform to exchange resources when there is a big event...

These thresholds are too low. A big anchor can quickly copy them by forming a team, and maybe even poach people from the MCN company. Such unprofessional state will immediately wipe out a large number of MCNs.

Soon, MCN will enter a higher level of PK - the PK of the ecological chain.

2. Ecological chain PK

The refined purchase of traffic and refined operation of data; the ability to creatively plan e-commerce activities, the configuration of live broadcast venues, live broadcast equipment, live broadcast room decoration, live broadcast room atmosphere and field control; the refined management of logistics operation, warehousing management, product selection mechanism and other back-end links...

As well as the future business contact capabilities for top anchor artists and the planning capabilities for the anchors’ personal IPs...these will become the key to whether an MCN can survive.

When unprofessional companies are eliminated from this industry, MCNs will fall into the third competitive landscape - business homogeneity.

Simply put, even if your team is very professional, you will still end up with no money to make because your anchor types and business models are too similar to those of your competitors. If MCN does not find a way to eliminate competition, it will continue to be in trouble.

3. Positioning PK

We know that live streaming is a very time-killing mode. A typical e-commerce anchor will usually broadcast for 5-6 hours in the evening.

The competition among MCN companies is to grab the prime time from 20:00 to 24:00 every night. From this perspective, the competition between MCN companies is the same as that between TV stations. The anchor resources are the TV station’s popular dramas and variety shows, and the number of online viewers is equivalent to the ratings.

If we refer to how TV stations came to the fore, we can understand how MCN will deal with the fierce competition in the industry in the future.

Take Hunan Satellite TV as an example. In order to stand out from the crowd, Hunan Satellite TV positioned the channel as a "channel for young people". Both its TV dramas and variety shows were targeted at young people between the ages of 16 and 25, forming a clear competitive distinction from other satellite TV stations.

The biggest evolution in the anchor industry in the future will be professional differentiation. Currently, most of the anchors on the market are show anchors, game anchors, and e-commerce anchors.

In the future, you will see more emotional anchors, psychological healing anchors, knowledge anchors, trendy play anchors, financial anchors, handicraft anchors, fitness anchors, art anchors...

Every interest and every profession may give birth to a new Viya and Li Jiaqi, and behind every segmented circle is the positioning direction of an MCN company.

The ceiling of the live broadcast industry is the total national time, but the strategic deployment of MCN companies should not be to grab time share, but to actively divide the piece of cake that belongs only to you.

4. Technical PK

But the above are not the final future. Whether you like it or not, the core competitiveness of all industries in the future will only revolve around scientific terms such as AI, big data, and algorithms.

In the future, there may be an MCN company that does not have any anchors, but only a group of scientists and designers. However, this group of scientists and designers can use technology to synthesize tens of thousands of virtual anchors.

For this technical MCN, their definition of a top anchor is "a certain algorithm model within a certain period"; their definition of an outdated anchor is "this algorithm model has poor iteration performance";

Their product selection logic does not rely on people, but on data; their supply chain is not built by visiting factories, but on a collective OEM management platform.

For the platform, this MCN is no longer a resource supplier but a technology developer; for the anchors, the future will see explosive employment and precipitous unemployment.

Prediction 4: “Full-scenario live streaming” will undermine brand marketing theory

The biggest charm of live streaming is "real-time interaction", but in the current live streaming environment, the worst thing is real-time interaction. We can only send texts, connect to a microphone occasionally, and can't even switch to a live broadcast screen. What a crude technology.

I believe that live broadcast technology will enter the "full-scene live broadcast" stage. The so-called "full-scene live broadcast" means that we can use VR+live broadcast to understand the business activities of the company in various scenarios.

For example, if you are a clothing brand and your anchor is introducing the printing and dyeing process of clothes in the live broadcast room, you can directly cut to the factory scene to let customers really see the printing and dyeing process and let fans chat with the technical workers in the factory, which will make it easier to facilitate transactions.

Many articles have also mentioned the arrival of full-scene live streaming, but they have not thought about: When full-scene live streaming becomes popular, what impact will it have on our business?

After the popularization of full-scenario live streaming, the biggest impact is that it will continue to disintegrate brand theories and business methods, giving marketing a different posture.

Let’s first look at a picture, which is a distribution map of beauty brand OEM factories.

From this picture, we can see that many big-name products come from the same OEM factory. Although this is no secret in the industry, it is a secret at the consumer level.

Beauty, dairy products, luxury goods, electrical appliances... Many big brands in these industries can sell at higher prices because of their years of brand management.

They created the brand through a series of "external means" such as product packaging, store display, spokespersons, brand stories, etc. For example, a certain domestic cosmetics brand won the market by relying on its extremely beautiful product packaging and brand concept.

But in the future, when consumers generally care about the brand's business activities, and when consumers know that you are actually no different, many classic branding techniques will become over-packaging and false advertising in the eyes of consumers.

As some cost-effective brands actively promote full-scene live streaming, and factory stores use live streaming to move from behind the scenes to the front stage, consumers may regard live streaming as a necessary step to view business activities, just like when buying things, they would check whether there is a "three guarantees service".

Live streaming will make all companies face consumers nakedly. There is only one relationship between consumers and brands, which is a transparent relationship.

My advice to all companies is: Don’t avoid the “eye of the sky” of live streaming. The future world will have everything, but there will be no secrets.

Future brand marketing will focus on managing the "face" and the "inside". If you are still obsessed with telling brand stories, be careful that your brand story may turn into a brand accident.

Prediction 5: Reconstructing the competitiveness of the entertainment industry, from PK content to PK interactive content

Douyin's "Zhai Strawberry" Music Festival, Tencent's TMElive, Kuaishou's "Yuanyin" online concert, Changba's Live House, NetEase Cloud's "Light Up the Scene Action Plan", Damai and Youku's joint launch of the "Parallel Mai Live" plan...

The 2020 epidemic not only prompted the transformation of catering, supermarkets, and K12 education to online, but also the evolution of the large cultural and entertainment industry. The most typical example is offline concerts exploring online live models.

But the problem is that online live broadcasts are ultimately separated by a screen, and fans cannot feel the roars or the beats of the notes on the scene. The overall physical sensation is several levels worse. In other words, fans who buy tickets to concerts nowadays don’t go to listen to the music, but to feel the music.

The business model of music live cannot be established by simply moving offline to online.

In May 2020, iQiyi Entertainment Center created an online live for Click#15 called "32768 Possibilities": During the live broadcast, there will be 15 multiple-choice questions throughout the concert, and every real-time choice made by the user will determine the direction of the concert.

Unlike other media music live shows, iQiyi Live does not rely on celebrity resources, but is actively exploring interactive content for online live shows. Simply put, iQiyi treats live as a music experience rather than just moving the concert from offline to online.

In the future, the competition among major media outlets for online live shows will not be about artist resources or how cool the live settings are, but about how to use technology to upgrade the audience's on-site experience, making online concerts as exciting as offline ones, or even cooler than offline ones.

Not only concerts, but the future variety show market will also be further transformed by live streaming.

The concept of live variety shows has been practiced for a long time, but unfortunately all the live variety shows in the past have become defective products in the laboratory. For example, Youku’s "Stalker Project" and Panda TV’s "Hello! Goddess", Tencent Video's "Our Fifteen", and various live micro-variety shows with a budget of 50,000 per episode on platforms such as Laifeng and Yingke... have all become "martyrs" in the history of variety shows.

The reason for this, apart from the lack of 4G technology and the immature live broadcast environment at the time, the biggest reason is that what everyone was doing was not "live variety show" but "variety show live broadcast".

If netizens' comments, voting, barrage and other forms are used as the carriers of live variety shows, then whether the variety show is broadcast live or not has no practical significance at all. The biggest charm of live streaming lies in real-time interaction. If a live variety show cannot allow users to "participate in real time", then the live broadcast is meaningless.

In the era of live streaming, all entertainment products are not about creating content, but about creating "interactive content."

What is "interactive content"? That is, your content cannot just look good, it must allow users to deeply participate in it and allow users to have strong interaction like a game.

Creating good content and creating good interactive content should be two completely different production ideas. Let’s take an example. Are filming “Avatar” and “Love Apartment” the same production technique? The camera positions, art sets, the acting styles of the actors... are all completely different.

In the future, if producers want to win over audiences, including live music shows, live variety shows, live dramas, live symphonies, live circuses, etc., they must not only design the content, but also integrate technology and content to produce interactive content.

In the future entertainment industry, we need not only content talents, but also technical talents, and even more so compound talents who combine technology and content.

Prediction 6: The “Cloud Economy” will split the world into two

Live streaming + VR = cloud economy. When people mention "cloud economy", they usually think of simpler concepts such as "cloud shopping", "cloud test driving" and "cloud house viewing". These concepts simply move the offline experience online, making you feel more immersed and real.

But in fact, the future "cloud economy" will be the sharpest double-edged sword, so sharp that it can divide the world we live in into two worlds, one is called the real world and the other is called the cloud world.

Let’s think of a cloud consumption scenario - “cloud karaoke”.

One day in 2030, you and your bestie make an appointment to sing karaoke online. You put on VR glasses and enter an online KTV. As a gold card member, you can choose from three top karaoke rooms:

A KTV Experience Room on the Top of Mount Fuji: Sing to the heaven and earth, the snow and the cherry blossoms on the top of Mount Fuji.

B Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea Undersea Karaoke Experience Room: Sing with a microphone made of shells underwater surrounded by fish and floating aquatic plants, and enjoy underwater sound effects.

C William Castle Scream Karaoke Experience Room: Sing in the castle under the moonlight surrounded by vampires and werewolves. If you don’t sing well, you will be taken away by vampire bats and turned into a mummy.

Then one day the next week, another best friend invites you to KTV in Chaoyang District, saying that you haven't seen each other for a long time and want to sing together. You replied unhappily, "Hey, Dee, that's boring... let's have a fight online!"

This is the cloud economy of the future. It will make you feel that the online world is a paradise and the offline world is just reality. If the greatest charm of the cloud economy is the "sense of immersion", then the greatest harm of the cloud economy is the "sense of addiction".

The "cloud economy" will give rise to a group of people living in the cloud world, and will also give rise to industries that make a living around the cloud economy. This is by no means as simple as "homebody culture". Homebody culture only isolates you from the outside world, while cloud economy allows you to own another world, thus completely abandoning the real world that hurts you...

Therefore, the "cloud economy" changes not only the economy, but also human behavior and ethics. You may think it’s a bit far-fetched that the cloud economy will affect human cultural ethics. Then let’s think about an interesting industry - cloud behavioral therapy.

This industry can help us treat patients with inherent abnormalities, such as pedophiles.

Although homosexuality, SM and other niche sexual fetishes are relatively niche, they have basically been "tolerated" by society. Only pedophilia is despised by everyone.

But what many people don’t know is that pedophilia is not just the bad taste of some people, it is a disease in itself.

Studies have found that the "white matter" in the brains of pedophiles is different from that of normal people. White matter is responsible for transmitting signals in the brain. Therefore, normal people will feel protective desire when they see children, while pedophiles will feel sexual desire.

These scientific studies all point to a fact that has been accepted by the academic community but not recognized by ordinary people like us: pedophilia is an innate "orientation".

In other words, these pedophiles are actually a group of unlucky people. If a person is born gay then they can loudly defend their sexual choice, but pedophiles are just scumbags. If they do not reasonably suppress their desires, they will turn to crime.

I believe that "Cloud Behavioral Therapy" can effectively reduce the crime rate of pedophiles.

All pedophiles can fill out an application form with their real name on the psychotherapy website and receive a medical diagnosis from a professional doctor. Doctors can not only treat the disease through medication, but also use "cloud behavioral therapy" to simulate real pedophilia scenarios for patients.

Firstly, it is to release their criminal desires, and secondly, with the help of some behavioral therapies, they can gradually develop a disgust for pedophilia.

All of this relies on live broadcast + VR technology on the medical side, which is not only convenient and private, but more importantly, it can allow patients with psychopathic personality disorders to have a real sense of immersion, thereby reducing their desire to commit crimes in the real world.

This is the future of the "cloud economy". It has split two overlapping worlds. While we enjoy the benefits of the cloud economy, we also have to bear its destructive power.

Prediction 7: Live streaming will be a "hidden weapon" to change the international economic and political landscape

As a person from Northeast China, I was once deeply worried about the economy of my hometown. There has always been a call to revitalize the old industrial areas in Northeast China, and the third service industry in Northeast China's restaurants and nightclubs has always been the only one that barely supports the Northeast's economy.

Later I found out that it was Kuaishou that saved the Northeast economy.

Not only are the four major Kuaishou anchors Sanda Ge, Simba, Fangzhang, and Erlu from the Northeast, but there are also countless ordinary people from the Northeast who use Kuaishou to make a living.

They use live streaming to sell wild honey from the mountains, sticky rice dumplings from their homes, and smoked red sausage from Harbin... There's really not much to sell, but they can still speak in their naturally comedic Northeastern dialect and use the rewards from the live streaming to supplement their family income.

This can also be regarded as a model of how live streaming can improve the regional economy.

If we look at the global regional economy from the perspective of Northeast China’s live broadcast industry, we will find that what really needs to be saved are the people of the world who are still in dire straits.

• Don’t the African tribesmen who eat raw meat and drink blood every day deserve our reward for dancing in front of the camera?
• Nepal's honey hunters collect honey on steep cliffs. Isn't this honey worth our high price?
• Shouldn’t children in Southeast Asian villages have equal access to educational resources through live streaming?

The world economic structure and China's regional economic structure are similar, and both have imbalances in economic development. Connecting everything efficiently is an important way to solve regional economic imbalances. Allowing goods from poor areas to find people who need them is a means of addressing economic imbalances;

Enabling knowledge and education from developed areas to benefit poor areas is a means to solve the imbalance in education;

Allowing the life culture of different ethnic groups in different regions to be passed on to each other is a means to resolve cultural conflicts and imbalances in political ideas.

The greatest power of the Internet is connection, and live streaming is the most efficient of all connections. Just imagine, when there are tens of thousands of individual merchants doing business through live streaming between the United States and Iraq, how can the US government start a war?

But why do people say that live streaming sales is a "hidden weapon" rather than an "open weapon"?

Let’s take China and the world economic landscape as an example. In recent years, Tiktok, Alipay, Xiaomi and OPPO have all gone overseas, and China will use the Internet to bind itself more closely with other countries in the world. However, when Chinese Internet companies enter other countries, they will inevitably encounter resistance from the other country's national sentiment.

For example, Taobao’s overseas expansion. When Taobao grows bigger in other countries, which country's government can be confident in allowing the vast majority of domestic small and medium-sized enterprises to open businesses on websites in other countries? If the policy of this website changes, will the country's GDP change accordingly?

But if it is live streaming to sell goods, the matter becomes milder.

For example, Tiktok in Southeast Asia. Tiktok is just a life and entertainment app. If a farmer sells tropical fruits on Tiktok, it is more like the farmer’s own personal choice. Tiktok can use live streaming to sell goods, quietly activating businesses in Southeast Asia while reducing political sensitivity.

After the 5G era, the Internet will break national boundaries faster. The global popularity of China's live streaming sales model will transform "trade exchanges" between countries into "business exchanges" between the people of a country and the people of other countries.

Live streaming sales are more like a personal business behavior rather than a country’s political intention.

To sum up

I predicted the impact of live streaming on the future world from seven aspects: business environment, technological changes, market competition, brand marketing, entertainment industry, cultural ethics, and international economic and political landscape.

Whether I am speaking with certainty or talking nonsense may not be important. As I said at the beginning: predicting the future is not to judge the future more accurately, but to help us better correct the present.

Author: General Liang

Source: Liang Jiangjun (ID-liangjiangjunisme)