Is the TV industry about to change? PPTV's open strategy is implemented, stirring up the smart TV market

According to statistics, the penetration rate of smart TVs reached 84.5% in 2015. By 2016, the sales of smart TVs exceeded 50 million units, and the penetration rate exceeded 95%. It is estimated that the sales of smart TVs this year will be close to 70 million units. While rapidly occupying the living room, the smart TV industry has gone through the development stages of competing on price, piling up hardware, and competing for content. Now another huge change is brewing.

Nowadays, most smart TV manufacturers are still relying on exclusive content to play the "differentiation card" to grab market share and force users to choose sides. However, as the first product to implement PPTV's "open sharing" strategy, Konka's "Tianhe series" new products equipped with PPTV Rubic smart TV system and all content have been launched on Suning.com. This heralds the end of the era of closed competition, and the competition in the smart TV industry has officially entered the second half.

PPTV opens up billions of content resources to explore new ways to play with smart TVs

Judging from the overall situation of the color TV industry in recent years, manufacturers, in addition to being affected by the overall environment, are also under pressure from rising prices of TV raw materials, declining performance, market saturation, supply chain, etc. Last year, LeTV Super TV raised its product prices twice due to insufficient supply and demand and rising trends in the upstream supply chain. In this difficult situation, both Internet upstarts and traditional color TV manufacturers have no choice but to bite the bullet and increase their voice in product prices.

According to the latest survey data, the current Chinese market for LCD TVs is close to saturation. Sales were sluggish in Q1 2017, with domestic sales of 12.168 million units, down 5.3% year-on-year. Q1 overseas sales were 31.88 million units, down 10.1% year-on-year. Cost pressure and product upgrades drive price increases. As panel prices have risen sharply across the board, cost pressure has become prominent, and the profit margins of whole machine manufacturers have been squeezed. Among them, the price increase of panels in the 39-inch to 49-inch size segment is the largest, and the price increase is also the most obvious. Compared with 2016W28, the price of 39-inch panels has increased by 36.4%, and the price of 49-inch panels has increased by 16.7%; only the profit of 55-inch whole machine manufacturers is acceptable, with a price increase of only 5.3%.

Internet companies may feel the impact of the new round of reshuffle more obviously. But relatively speaking, as long as they can get through this hurdle, they will undoubtedly stand more firmly in the next market competition.

The Internet's disruption of the color TV industry has now made the era of traditional TVs that once competed on hardware a thing of the past. In the era of smart TVs, the emphasis is on hardware equality, and the richness of content has become an important consideration for users when purchasing TVs.

In this context, brand manufacturers with content genes often become the leaders in the market. Take PPTV as an example. It has been deeply involved in the content market for 12 years and has a film and television library resource of 300,000 hours. It also holds the exclusive all-media copyright of popular sports content such as La Liga, Chinese Super League, and Asian Champions League, which is worth more than 10 billion yuan and covers 90% of sports events. It is unmatched in the industry in terms of content accumulation and has a huge advantage.

However, with the deepening of the intelligence of the color TV market, smart TVs are getting rid of the hardware attributes of traditional TVs and transforming into a multi-dimensional home Internet large-screen connection portal, which is favored by the capital market. However, compared with PCs and mobile Internet devices, the closed nature of the smart TV industry has obviously become a disadvantage.

Faced with the inevitable trend of "open cooperation" in the future development of the smart TV industry, PPTV chose to use its content library built with real money and human-computer interaction technology accumulated over many years to build a mutually beneficial smart TV cooperation platform, and launched a new Rubic smart TV system, using it as the core carrier to empower traditional TV manufacturers.

In this way, the smart TV industry will hopefully form a development model that separates the platform from the hardware, turning the original competitors into cooperative relationships. PPTV's gameplay allows the TV manufacturers that cooperate with it to continue to play their strengths in their areas of strength, focus on hardware research and development, reduce corporate risks, reduce duplication of work and resource consumption in the industry, and promote the rapid development of China's color TV industry.

Empowering the industry to help traditional TV manufacturers transform

For emerging smart TV manufacturers, the Internet-based TV trend is undoubtedly a hot spot for startups that attracts a lot of attention. However, for traditional TV manufacturers, the forced transformation in the new era is inevitably accompanied by pain. Huge capital investment and huge market risks have caused many stars of the last era to fail. For the survivors, the sharp decline in hardware profits, the loss of market share and the cost of content production are still the difficulties that lie ahead.

However, with the further changes in the market structure, the smart TV industry has entered the second half with win-win cooperation as the main theme. PPTV has brought the mature Rubic smart TV system and powerful shared content platform to the industry, bringing greater imagination space for the future of the smart TV industry.

Different from the oligopolistic market structure centered on a closed ecological loop that LeTV is striving to build, PPTV's open cooperation strategy aims to fully open up the platform, content, and hardware links, bringing more possibilities to the industry and giving every traditional TV manufacturer the opportunity to demonstrate its hardware strength.

At present, the manufacturers cooperating with PPTV on the "open sharing" strategy include not only Konka, whose new products have been put on the shelves as mentioned above, but also Philips, Sharp, etc. It is understood that the new models of Philips and PPTV have been shipped and will be launched soon. From the industry chain's admiration for PPTV's platform strategy and the speed of the cooperative products landing, it can be seen that traditional TV manufacturers who lack content and Internet genes recognize and look forward to PPTV's "open sharing" strategy.

In fact, apart from the shortcomings in content, Konka, Philips and Sharp have decades of experience in the color TV industry, and they are still the leaders in hardware technology. Their brand value and offline channel construction even surpass those of emerging smart TV brands. Therefore, when the hardware capabilities of the above manufacturers are combined with PPTV's system and content capabilities, they still have great potential in the future.

The deep logic behind the open PPTV strategy in the era of content being king

For PPTV, the platform builder itself, the significance of the "open sharing" strategy is even greater.

In addition to opening up the content platform, the positioning of PPTV's smart TV hardware will also change. As the hardware core of PPTV, PPTV smart TV uses the Rubic smart TV system as the core carrier, conforming to the market trend of "consumption upgrade" and continuing to move towards high-end, making room for competitors while also shifting the focus of research and development to software and content open platforms.

The high-quality system and powerful content ecosystem will be able to be transformed into the premium ability of the PPTV brand, further paving the way for the high-end development of its own hardware and forming a virtuous circle.

Just like Google's Nexus and Microsoft's Surface, while promoting Android and Windows, they will also become the hardware benchmarks of the platform as high-end flagships of the ecosystem. At the same time, the smooth promotion of the platform will also clear the way for the monetization of high-value content and resources.

Looking at the two major Internet portals, Android and Windows, it is not difficult to find that in the Internet era, openness and win-win are the inevitable direction of development, and the smart TV industry is of course no exception.

At present, PPTV, which owns a huge content resource library, covers the most comprehensive sports copyrights, and has the PPTV Rubic smart TV system with advanced user interaction experience, is using its unique resources to open up the industrial chain and ultimately achieve a collective leap in the industry. PPTV has taken the first step in open sharing and has undoubtedly occupied a first-mover advantage. As for the future of the industry, it is even more worth looking forward to.

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.