Alibaba Digital Entertainment Application Center has not given up on TV business. The distribution volume in half a year has reached 197 million.

In the past three years, Alibaba Digital Entertainment has always held the "Alibaba TV Developer Conference" every year to convey Alibaba's relevant policies and technical support on large-screen TVs to developers.

In 2016, Alibaba's TV business continued. According to Fan Heling, head of Alibaba TV games and application center, in July 2016, the monthly distribution volume of Alibaba Application Center officially exceeded 40 million. The total distribution volume from January to July reached 197 million, exceeding the total distribution volume for the whole year of 2015.

Impressive data

At the beginning of this year, there were rumors that Alibaba Digital Entertainment’s TV business was stranded, especially the TV game department, which was in a miserable situation of “people left and the tea was cold”.

But judging from the data released by Alibaba today, the situation is not that bad. Fan Heling introduced in his speech that currently more than 14 million users use Alibaba Digital Entertainment Application Center every month, and each user launches 1.87 applications on average. Statistics show that in July 2016, the monthly distribution volume of the application center officially exceeded 40 million, and the total distribution volume from January to July reached 197 million, exceeding the total distribution volume for the whole year of 2015.

Such a large-scale distribution capability relies on the sales volume of Tmall Magic Box in the market. In the past two years, Alibaba Digital Entertainment has incorporated 70% of the OTT terminals in the market into YunOS through its subsidy policy for TV box manufacturers.

According to data from Aowei Cloud Network, in the first half of 2016, the top 10 box brands were Tmall, Xiaomi, Diayoutech, Inphic, Yidian, Huawei, Skyworth, Himax, Tianmin and Fiberhome; the retail volume shares of each brand were 32.5%, 20.0%, 10.5%, 9.2%, 4.6%, 4.3%, 3.4%, 2.6%, 2.1% and 1.7% respectively; Tmall box sales share increased the most year-on-year, up 11.1 percentage points.

In addition, according to people familiar with the matter in the Alibaba Cloud Alliance, with the implementation of Alibaba's new policy in early April, more than 200 original Alibaba Cloud box brands have been eliminated, and only 25 core brands are retained. The management and control will be stricter in the future, and the number of shortlisted brands will only decrease and not increase.

Monetization becomes a keyword

How to realize value realization is the most important issue for TV large-screen developers. Previously, the distribution channels controlled by Alibaba were mostly OTT smart TV set-top boxes, and the users of a large number of knockoff TV boxes were mostly users in third- and fourth-tier cities and rural areas, and their ability to pay for TV content applications was extremely low. This phenomenon was particularly evident in TV game platforms.

When talking about the commercial development of the application center, Fan Heling introduced that the developers' journey of monetization on the platform has developed very rapidly. Since the trial of in-app charging at the end of last year, in just half a year, nearly 60% of applications have connected to the payment SDK, including various types of applications. For the other 40% of developers, access to payment has been included in the annual plan, reflecting the developers' confidence in the platform and even the industry.

At the same time, the Alibaba platform will also provide more support to developers, such as the new version of the content direct access function and the one-click installation function, which will allow content to be more directly displayed to users and improve conversion. For example, new activity templates can better display activity elements and encourage users to download. The release of the advertising SDK will bring more developers the possibility of monetization.

After incorporation, subsidies, and policy adjustments, Alibaba's TV business has become more pragmatic and more rational in facing the domestic OTT market. The overall feeling given is that they are truly willing to help developers make a difference on the big screen of TV.

From the perspective of developers, after several rounds of reshuffles, developers who are still willing to stay in the large-screen TV business basically have products to show off. The mixed situation of TV applications and games has improved, and the path of high-quality development has also become the unanimous choice of platform operators.

Compared with the Alibaba TV Developer Conference in the past two years, the atmosphere of this year's conference was obviously not as enthusiastic as before. Some old faces in the industry are disappearing, and there are not many new faces. This also fully proves that the large-screen TV market has entered a cold winter after experiencing the madness of the wild period, and manufacturers who have almost burned out their money have left the market one after another.

For Alibaba and developers, in the future, on TV platforms, it is not only necessary to expand the content, but more importantly, they should think clearly about how to achieve a win-win situation with users. I hope no one will repeat the mistake of losing everything.

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.