Live video streaming, online claw machine and the Internet of Things, where will the next trend be?

Is it possible for an industry that has been tepid for more than a decade and has not received much attention from capital to become a hot spot overnight? The claw machine tells us that it can.

Starting from the beginning of spring this year, this "antique" suddenly gained new life; around August, it quickly became popular with the help of the online model and became a hot spot for many well-known investment institutions.

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When offline value was rediscovered, claw machines quickly became popular

On November 15, ZEGO Technology organized a forum and invited Alice Luo Tingxia, founding partner of Brilliant Capital, Zhang Huaping, founder of Bianfeng.com, and Jiang Ningbo, co-founder of ZEGO Technology, to have a dialogue to provide in-depth interpretations of this trend from the perspectives of investors, entrepreneurs, and technology providers.

We have compiled the highlights of the conversation below, hoping that it will be helpful to friends who are interested in this field.

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Zego Live live broadcast by Zego Technology

Why did online claw machine become popular overnight?

From an investor's perspective, there are four reasons why online claw machine games have become popular:

1. The claw machine itself has a history of more than ten years and has accumulated a large number of offline users. The group base is large enough, and these are all potential users of online claw machines.

2. Thanks to the vigorous development of mobile payment, online live broadcast and Internet of Things technology, the technical foundation of online claw machine has actually matured.

3. Compared with offline, online claw machine is not restricted by venue, and the threshold becomes lower as the scenarios are broadened.

4. The online model can make good use of social media and word-of-mouth communication, so it is inevitable that it will be rolled out quickly.

Alice said that Brilliant Capital has been paying attention to the hot sector of claw machines for a long time, and has also seen the bottleneck that offline models are difficult to break through. Traditional claw machines are limited by scenarios, and the business model is relatively scattered, making it difficult to form integration. Online gameplay breaks these limitations and can convert users and traffic well, with considerable monetization capabilities.

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Alice Luo, founding partner of Brilliant Capital

Is online claw machine already a red ocean?

From the current market perspective, there are three main types of players entering this field:

The first batch of players who entered the market the earliest were mostly players who had transformed from other niche areas, including teams that originally worked on social, gaming, VR and other products. Online claw machine games have the product characteristics of these fields, so these players were able to quickly convert their original technology and user accumulation and quickly gain first-mover advantage. Currently, most of the online claw machine games that rank high in the App Store belong to this category.

The second group saw this trend and entered quickly, and they themselves did not have relevant backgrounds. The biggest challenge for this type of players at present is technical stability. They need a lot of time to build technical solutions, and only teams with strong R&D capabilities can survive.

The third group is the entry of big players, including live broadcast, social platforms, etc. They have huge traffic advantages, and online doll grabbing is a good way for them to realize their profits.

Alice believes that although there are already many players entering this field, it is still a multi-polar market with room for imagination. If new players are able to obtain traffic at a lower cost, there are still a lot of opportunities to quickly achieve scale.

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Host Xian Niu demonstrates online doll grabbing

What kind of projects can stand out?

After reviewing more than 20 online claw machine projects, Alice summarized three key factors for entrepreneurs to break through in this field:

1. Technical stability. Everything may start from the product itself. The field of online claw machine seems to have a low threshold, but in fact there are barriers in many details. Many projects have not been able to solve the problems of delay and jamming, which can easily lead to customer loss.

2. User experience. In addition to the smooth viewing and operating experience, the team's post-operation operation will also directly affect the user experience. How to make this light game more social is also a priority for entrepreneurs.

3. Product differentiation. As various players have quickly entered the market, the homogeneity of online claw machine products has gradually become prominent. New players still have a chance to break through, but their products must have obvious differences and highlights to stand out in this field.

Alice believes that innovation and growth are equally important for startups in any field. Innovation determines whether a company can quickly seize the market, while growth determines whether a company can develop sustainably. There are many similarities between the current online claw machine and Werewolf, which was invested by Brilliant Capital earlier. Both of them have accumulated enough offline and finally exploded online. Entrepreneurs who want to make a breakthrough in this field may also wish to benchmark the growth trajectory of Werewolf, and I believe they can get a lot of inspiration from it.

How can entrepreneurial teams quickly enter this field?

Breaking through the technical bottleneck is a prerequisite for entry. Many entrepreneurs have come up with good product models and are able to obtain traffic and operate well, but the technical team cannot produce products immediately. According to Jiang Ningbo, co-founder of Zego Technology, even for teams with strong technology and abundant resources in large Internet companies, the development cycle of online claw machine from idea to demo takes about 100 days, which is very long for a rapidly emerging field.

However, entrepreneurs still have good choices. After the cultivation of the first year of live broadcast in 2016, there are already very mature voice and video real-time communication cloud service providers on the market that can provide one-stop solutions for online claw machine projects. For example, Zhegu Technology, founded by the former core team of Tencent QQ, currently has a proven one-stop solution for online claw machine, including hardware solutions and software solutions, and even provides agency operation services, which can package and solve all technical problems faced by entrepreneurs and help them quickly launch products.

In 2015, Zego Technology was founded by Lin Youyao, former general manager of QQ, and four senior directors of Tencent. Lin Youyao was the chief architect of QQ hummer, leading QQ to steadily move from the PC era to the mobile era, which is still in use today. He led the team to win the Tencent Best Technology Award twice. The four Tencent directors have made great contributions to QQ in the fields of voice and video, cloud backend, platform terminals and business sales. It is reported that Zego Technology received a multi-million dollar round A investment from IDG at the end of 2015.

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Jiang Ningbo, co-founder of Zego Technology

Some startup teams in the industry have a biased perception that the technical threshold for online claw machines is very low. Jiang Ningbo, co-founder of Zego Technology, disagrees. He analyzed that a complete set of online claw machine solutions includes hardware solutions and software solutions. The hardware solution includes the selection of the system board on the claw machine side, the tuning of the system board and the serial port of the crane crane, and the software solution includes the development of the video live broadcast system and the real-time signaling control system. Even if the team has strong technical capabilities and abundant resources, it will take at least 100 days to develop on the open source solution, and it will take time to run steadily after development.

Then, Jiang Ningbo shared in depth the technical difficulties and advantages of Zego Technology's one-stop solution. There are generally three options for hardware solutions on the market: PC, Android board or IP Camera.

The advantages of PC are simplicity, speed and good compatibility; the disadvantage is high cost (the average price of a PC is around 5,000). In order to save costs, one PC is often used to run several claw machines, which brings another disadvantage: if the PC crashes, several claw machines will also stop working, and the revenue affected will be relatively high.

The advantages of Android boards are that they are mature, stable, widely applicable, and reasonably priced (an Android board costs between 300 and 400 yuan); the disadvantage is of course that they are not as convenient as PCs, but the installation of Android boards is also very simple.

The advantage of IP Camera is its relatively low cost, but its disadvantage is its instability and high development and debugging costs: embedded development is required to burn the program into the hardware, which makes development and debugging very troublesome.

The software solution includes real-time voice and video communication and real-time signaling control. Real-time voice and video communication includes acquisition, pre-processing, encoding, streaming, streaming, decoding and rendering. Real-time signaling control includes signaling upload and push, as well as real-time synchronization control. The biggest pain point of the software solution is how to achieve ultra-low latency. The latency of the iQiyi solution is within 300 milliseconds, and the maximum can reach 100 milliseconds. This latency performance is leading in the industry. When asked why the iQiyi team can achieve such low latency, Jiang Ningbo introduced three points:

1. Jiegou adopts a private protocol based on UPD, which can better combat packet loss and jitter in weak network environments and is conducive to achieving ultra-low latency.

2. Jigoo has 16 years of technical accumulation in voice and video technologies such as source coding, channel coding, flow control and code control, and has achieved excellence in these details.

3. It is also the times that make heroes. Jiegou's clients include well-known companies such as Yingke, Huajiao, Yizhibo, Himalaya FM, Momo and Kugou Live. Their innovative business scenarios and stringent requirements have made Jiegou's solutions outstanding.

Jiang Ningbo also shared some behind-the-scenes stories: the core part of the online claw machine solution of Zego was completed by the team through two days and two nights of intensive overtime work. From the time the founder went to the claw machine manufacturer to bring back a few claw machines to the time the Demo APP was launched and 100 dolls were caught, it took exactly two days and two nights. The host couldn't help but joked that the development cycle was just said to be 100 days, but the Zego team only took two days and two nights to intensively tackle the problem and come up with this solution. Is the technical threshold of this solution really that high?

Jiang Ningbo replied with a smile, because standing on the shoulders of giants, we can see far and move fast. He explained that the core technical difficulty of online claw machines lies in video live broadcasting, and the video live broadcasting technology of Zego Technology is ready-made, and it has been verified by a number of well-known manufacturers such as Inke, Huajiao and Yizhibo in 2016, the first year of live broadcasting. In addition, the core team of Zego is from the old team of Tencent QQ, and its technical strength and accumulation are also the best in the industry. Therefore, with the combination of these "giants' shoulders", the Zego team can develop online claw machine solutions so efficiently.

In the past two years, Zhegu Technology has repeatedly polished this SDK according to the needs of the video live broadcast industry, and its stability has been fully guaranteed. Online claw machine is a game based on live broadcast. Only by presenting the scene in the claw machine in real time can the real claw machine experience be restored to the greatest extent.

How do entrepreneurial teams build competitive barriers?

Zhang Huaping, founder of Bianfeng.com, said that they had a lot of trial and error in the early days of entering the field of online claw machines. Although the team's R&D capabilities were not weak, it was still difficult to beat the time. Later, they chose to adopt the online claw machine solution of a voice and video real-time communication manufacturer. It seemed to be a step back, but it greatly improved the efficiency of the entire team. With more mature technical support, many innovative ways of playing can be quickly implemented as long as they can think of them, which is crucial for a startup team.

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Zhang Huaping, founder of Bianfeng.com

When asked why he wanted to do this project, Zhang Huaping recalled that the team had been working on a complete solution for live broadcast products before this, and was very sensitive to the dynamics of the live broadcast industry. When they came across information about online claw machines in August, they immediately conducted research. In addition, several members of the team also love to catch dolls, and some even claim to be claw machine killers. In addition, online claw machines are available 24 hours a day without venue restrictions or geographical restrictions, breaking away from the reliance of traditional claw machine stores on offline commercial traffic. They can use the Internet's strong fission transmission, and most importantly, the maturity of the Internet of Things technology and live video transmission technology, thus creating an explosion point with the right time, right place, and right people.

Zhang Huaping frankly said that he also thought that online claw machines were very simple at first, which was nothing more than adding a control board to the claw machine and then using an app to control the claw machine. After really digging deeper, he found that the selection of claw machines, what solution to use to control the claw machine, how to make the video not stuck, how the app communicates with the control board, and how the control board communicates with the claw machine are all very in-depth issues. Each link requires people familiar with the relevant technology to do research. If the team does not have the relevant technical background, there will be endless pitfalls in the process.

When talking about how to build a competitive barrier, Zhang Huaping said that this depends on the timing. Taking his team as an example, the most important thing at this point in time is user experience. A little later, it will require the ability to quickly implement new gameplay. There are dozens of online claw machine apps on the market now. Whether they are leading or new, the basic product experience is not guaranteed. The delay is too high, the operation is not sensitive, and you can't see the response on the video after pressing the direction keys a few times. After pressing a few more times, you will find that you have gone too far. Only after solving the basic experience can we talk about innovation in gameplay. He believes that online claw machines will also introduce many new gameplays like live broadcasts, and whether these new gameplays can be quickly implemented and whether the product iteration can be quickly realized is an important challenge for the entrepreneurial team.

Xian Niu shared that from the experience of the Jigu team in the live broadcast industry, a considerable number of customers who do online claw machines are live broadcast platforms with their own traffic. The natural entertainment and social elements of live broadcasts will inevitably be grafted into the gameplay of online claw machines, and new business gameplay will continue to emerge. In an entertainment live broadcast room, if you can get the favor of an anchor, an expression or a message is enough to make an audience very happy and willing to continue to reward. If you play an online claw machine in a live broadcast room, the beautiful anchor and fans will catch dolls together, and the female anchor will give the dolls to the fans in person. A fan can receive a doll caught by the female anchor he admires, and it may also be a doll with the female anchor's scent. The sense of participation is simply bursting with excitement.

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The guests and hosts of the live show took a group photo at Zego Technology

Alice*** concluded that Brilliant Capital has seen many online claw machine projects and agrees that online claw machines will not just stay at the current stage. In the future, more and more elements will be grafted from live broadcasts and social platforms to the field of online claw machines, forming innovative gameplay, allowing users to actively participate in this game with entertainment and social nature. There is a challenge here, that is, the underlying technology construction must be able to support the development team to achieve business innovation, otherwise the opportunity will be missed if the ideas cannot be implemented. The most basic technical solutions for online claw machines must be solved to ensure user experience and enable innovative gameplay to be implemented, thereby forming a differentiated advantage in the cruel competitive market, seizing the opportunity for financing and the bonus period of traffic, and becoming stronger and bigger.