After taking over the box market, Alibaba Digital Entertainment upgraded its living room strategy and aimed directly at smart TVs

In recent years, the combination of "Internet + TV" has been given too much hope, and the home entertainment market has become a new battlefield for technology giants to compete for supremacy.

Among the three BAT companies, Alibaba has the greatest ambition in the living room market and is also the most active.

Today, Alibaba has once again upgraded its living room strategy and put forward the vision of Alibaba's home entertainment strategy - to build "the first ecosystem of home entertainment content in Chinese and Chinese-speaking regions."

As we all know, in the past few years, Alibaba Digital Entertainment has subsidized TV box manufacturers and brought more than 70% of the OTT boxes on the market under YunOS. According to data from Aowei Cloud Network, in the first half of 2016, the sales volume of Tmall Magic Box still led the market, with a sales share of 32.5%. As of now, Alibaba has more than 20 million daily active users of home entertainment.

After occupying the box market, Alibaba Digital Entertainment's next target is smart TV terminals, and it has released a future smart TV cooperation alliance strategy.

How to understand Alibaba's new policy

Before understanding the new strategy launched by Alibaba, we must first re-understand the current Alibaba Digital Entertainment. The Alibaba Digital Entertainment Division, which focuses on large-screen business, was established in 2014. Last year, Alibaba announced the establishment of the "Alibaba Big Entertainment Division", and the Digital Entertainment Division also belongs to the Big Entertainment Division. That is to say, after the establishment of the Alibaba Big Entertainment Division, it will continue to increase its investment in the battlefield of the living room, forming an entertainment ecosystem centered on Youtu, and ultimately achieving multi-terminal, cross-border and upstream and downstream integration.

As the specific executors of Alibaba's family entertainment strategy, Alibaba Digital Entertainment and Youku will collaborate on more business levels, including brand collaboration, content collaboration, data collaboration, membership collaboration, and commercial monetization collaboration.

This time, Alibaba also presented for the first time the terminal product matrix of Alibaba Home Entertainment, which is a cooperation between Youku, Alibaba Digital Entertainment and the two major licensees, Wasu and CIBN. They are the Future Smart TV Cooperation Alliance, the Digital Entertainment Set-top Box Alliance, Tmall Magic Box in cooperation with Wasu, Xiaokubao, Xiaoxiao Youku, Youku VR and CIBN Global Films in cooperation with CIBN.

The key issue is how to realize the future smart TV cooperation alliance strategy.

To this end, Alibaba Digital Entertainment launched the "TV Ecosystem Inside Plan", which hopes to achieve the following goal: "Make smart TVs easy to make in the world."

In other words, through cooperation, Alibaba will provide Alibaba YunOS system to those TV terminal manufacturers that do not have the ability to develop systems, and provide content matrix to those TV terminal manufacturers that do not have the ability to develop content.

According to Jia Wei, general manager of TV Alliance of Alibaba Group's Digital Entertainment Division, the cumulative shipments of smart TVs that have cooperated with Alibaba Digital Entertainment have exceeded 10 million units. This is equivalent to the annual sales of TVs of domestic first-tier TV manufacturers. In other words, although Alibaba has never produced a single TV hardware, it has tens of millions of Internet TV users.

When it comes to TV ecosystem Inside, Alibaba is not the only one doing this in the industry. Upengpule and Mango TV are actually doing similar things, providing operation services and content to terminal manufacturers that are only good at hardware. However, Alibaba Digital Entertainment does it more thoroughly, involving the underlying systems and content, and has also learned from the experience of its predecessors, such as first focusing on the children's content market.

There is no such thing as a difficult smart TV?

In the Internet industry, there have always been two successful models that are widely emulated, one is the Apple model and the other is the Google model.

In Apple's industrial chain, Apple is in charge of everything from the source of OS to production and manufacturing to content ecology. This is the path that LeTV has taken in the domestic Internet TV industry.

Google's Android is an extremely open system, and the brand management of using it is entirely the responsibility of the manufacturer. Alibaba's YunOS is more like the Google model, but it also has Apple's control over OS and content.

Jia Wei said that the traditional TV industry chain, which was mainly hardware-based, has undergone a qualitative change and evolved into today's smart TV ecological industry chain, which is mainly hardware + software + interaction + content + application. This industry chain is not only getting longer, but also becoming more three-dimensional. Under such a trend, no one company can complete the entire industry chain independently, and different companies must play their own advantages to complete it together.

In terms of role positioning, Li Jie, general manager of Alibaba Digital Entertainment Division, believes that "we are not integrators but enablers."

Currently, partners that have joined Alibaba Digital Entertainment’s “TV Ecosystem Inside Plan” include Haier, Konka, Changhong, Hisense, Skyworth, Sharp, Philips, and Whaley.

According to Jia Wei, Internet TV brands like Weijing use Alibaba YunOS at the bottom layer, but Weijing has created its own UI based on it.

Overall, Alibaba Digital Entertainment’s “TV Ecosystem Inside Plan” is very similar to what it did when it took over the box market, but it has also been upgraded. It not only simply provides a set of YunOS, but also makes some differentiated adjustments based on the needs of partners.

In other words, the Future Smart TV Cooperation Alliance established by Alibaba Digital Entertainment has lowered the industry threshold for making televisions. As long as manufacturers can come up with a brand, find a good OEM factory, and use Japanese and Korean panels, the hardware will be complete. In terms of software, they can directly use Alibaba YunOS, and those who are capable can make their own UI, and a new TV brand will be born.

Although the domestic TV market has not yet become a red ocean like the mobile phone market a few years ago, there are already about fifteen terminal manufacturers in total. With the entry of more brands, it is predictable that the future will soon see a major reshuffle of the TV box market like that of the past, and fall into the abyss of homogeneity.

An industry insider once told , "In fact, Alibaba Digital Entertainment could have done better in the box market that year, such as helping small manufacturers provide differentiated services, optimizing product experience, and guiding product development." Judging from Alibaba Digital Entertainment's upgraded strategy this time, it also intends to solve these problems.

Jack Ma recently said that he would “make it easy to do business anywhere in the world ”, and following this, he came up with “ making it easy to do smart TV anywhere in the world”.

But then again, when I heard Alibaba shout out this slogan, I would like to ask the bigwigs in the television industry, are you afraid?

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.