Lei Jun handed over the living room to Chen Tong

The dust has settled, and Chen Tong, the former editor-in-chief of Sina.com, has gone to Xiaomi.

Chen Tong will be responsible for Xiaomi's content investment and content operations as vice president. Chen Tong will lead the $1 billion investment in video content to enrich the content of Xiaomi TV, Xiaomi Box and Xiaomi Tablet.

The high-profile hiring of a new executive and the gesture of "spending $1 billion first" all reflect Xiaomi's emphasis on content... and anxiety.

Xiaomi's own hardware has three product lines. Smartphones: two brands, Smart Xiaomi and Redmi; living room products: Xiaomi Box, Xiaomi TV, Xiaomi Tablet; smart home: Xiaomi Router. Around these three lines, there are also a series of peripheral products and investments, such as Xiaomi mobile power bank, Xiaomi bracelet, etc., and Mi Rabbit dolls.

At present, the only line that has really achieved great success and driven Xiaomi's rapid growth is the smartphone business. When Xiaomi announced its performance, it mainly said how many mobile phones it sold and how much sales it had. Smart home is just getting started, and the only way to break through the product line at this stage is to start from the living room. However, living room products are mainly used for content consumption, especially video content consumption, which requires high support from the content industry chain. It is impossible to achieve a sales breakthrough by relying solely on cost-effectiveness and hardware workmanship. Moreover, if the content ecology is not resolved, it will also affect the "user reputation" that Xiaomi attaches the most importance to, and the dissatisfaction of existing users will have a negative impact on the next stage of sales. In addition, the supervision of the radio and television system has also added difficulties to the development of the TV content ecology.

Third-party statistics show that Xiaomi TV boxes have a market share of over 20% and are ranked first, but TV boxes have yet to become a mass-market consumer electronic product; perhaps traditional home appliance manufacturers are not to be feared, but Xiaomi TVs also face rivals like LeTV that have been cultivating content for many years; Xiaomi tablets have been available for sale for a long time, but it seems that they have not replicated the success of mobile phones.

Lei Jun attributed the problem to content: "After buying the product, users want to watch the content, so the entire content industry is a matter of life and death for Xiaomi TV, Xiaomi Box, Xiaomi mobile phone, and Xiaomi tablet. Otherwise, if we have such a well-made TV but our content is not rich enough, consumers will be very dissatisfied. Therefore, solving the content problem has become an urgent issue for Xiaomi."

Life-or-death, imminent... Lei Jun's words could not hide his anxiety. Xiaomi's current executive team all came from engineering and design backgrounds, and none of them were suitable for content, so Wang Chuan, who was in charge of boxes and TVs, found his old friend Chen Tong.

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The photo of Xiaomi officially welcoming Chen Tong to join is very intriguing. The three of them sat on both sides, with the Xiaomi TV behind them representing Xiaomi's dream of a living room, and Wang Chuan and Chen Tong shared power.

Lei Jun has set a task for Chen Tong in the first stage: "Content integration and content operation have become the most concerned contents of Xiaomi at this stage, and are also the core breakthrough points in the fields of TV and tablet. Our strategy is not to ask you, Chen, to take 1 billion US dollars to buy movies and do whatever you want. It is to use this 1 billion US dollars of investment to string together the entire content industry and make it perform better on Xiaomi TV." Chen Tong's own military order is "within half a year, the content of Xiaomi TV and Xiaomi box will undergo earth-shaking changes." Except for the game which will continue to be handled by Interactive Entertainment and has nothing to do with Chen Tong, the investment in video and other areas is within Chen Tong's authority.

From Xiaomi's perspective, Chen Tong is very suitable for this role.

In October, Xiaomi had already invested in Huace Film & TV, a leading TV drama production company in China. During his time at Sina, Chen Tong had gone through the portal, blog and Weibo eras. He had accumulated extensive business and entertainment connections through celebrity and big V promotion on blogs and Weibo. These resources can play a role in the next step of investment contacts and target selection. In particular, Xiaomi wants to "string together this industry chain." Apart from Chen Tong, there are not many suitable candidates. Moreover, Chen Tong entered the online news industry as a moderator of a sports salon. News, TV dramas, comprehensive entertainment and sports are precisely the program categories with the highest ratings/traffic, and Chen Tong has experience in these fields. If Xiaomi gets the broadcasting rights for a major event, will you buy a Xiaomi TV or box?

Xiaomi has repeatedly stressed that it will "never produce its own content" and "be honest" and share the benefits with its partners, with partners taking the lion's share and Xiaomi taking the smaller share. Judging from this plan, Xiaomi will not adopt the common model of directly purchasing video copyrights. Xiaomi, which controls both hardware and software, and the content companies it invests in are likely to make some innovations in broadcasting and charging models. The "news supermarket" model established by Chen Tong at Sina is also an operation and distribution of non-self-produced content. However, how much of these past news experiences can be used in the living room video industry remains to be seen.

Another thing Xiaomi is not suitable to say publicly is that Chen Tong is very suitable for the role of communicating with regulators. Document No. 181 of Radio and Television cuts off the direct path between Internet video content and smart TVs, and sets up two control valves: license holders and approval. Finding the most appropriate balance between supervision and daily operations is a daily task for Chen Tong, who has worked in the news field for 17 years and created the operating rules of Chinese portals. If you can communicate smoothly with regulators and quickly present richer content on Xiaomi TV, you can establish a relative leading advantage (think about how Sina Weibo came to be).

In addition to content investment, another important responsibility of Chen Tong is content operation. Videos are not just piled up in the video library. How to present them to users? Recommendation, placement, and sorting require strong operation and editing capabilities, and the insight into public psychology and the trend of the times that needs to be honed over time. The operation of videos and news operations are very similar. News portals need an editor-in-chief, and video platforms need one as well.

And it is not limited to video and living room products. Content operations will include videos, music, e-books and other forms of content, which will be presented on multiple terminals such as TVs, boxes, tablets and mobile phones. In fact, Chen Tong also has to play the role of an "editor-in-chief". Just like in a portal, he must "control the content production tendency based on data, use data to judge the general interests of the public, and be inclusive, recommend, sort, combine and balance information of different types, value judgments and interests". It's just that the form of the portal has been eliminated, or in other words, "the device is the portal". The goal of content investment and operation is to stick to current users, realize cash together with partners, and attract more users to buy new devices with unique content and operations. And get this virtuous cycle rolling.

Wang Chuan has done what he can in terms of hardware and systems, but whether the dream of Xiaomi's living room can be realized depends on the weakest part of the content ecosystem. It's time for Chen Tong, the vice president in charge of content investment and content operations, to make his debut.

In other words, Lei Jun has handed over all the living rooms to Chen Tong, and your living room may be one of them.

Original source: http://www.pingwest.com/chen-tong-joins-xiaomi/