Weijing CEO Li Huaiyu: VR is definitely the next trillion-dollar trend

Article source: Internet Hotspot

Introduction: The rise of mobile Internet has brought a large number of entrepreneurial opportunities. Which industry will become the next trillion-dollar market in the future?

With the transformation and development of the media industry, media giants have started to frequently invest since 2010. Not only are they aggressively taking the form of mergers and acquisitions, but they are also actively using their investment departments or funds to contact and invest in innovative companies earlier, and even cooperating with multiple parties to establish accelerators to discover and cultivate early projects. This allows their media empires to stand firm in the ever-changing entertainment development trend and seize the future industry track in advance.

According to the number and frequency of investment projects in the past five years, 13 media groups, including Comcast, Hearst Group, Verizon, New York Times, Disney, News Corporation, Bertelsmann, Discovery Channel, Time Warner, AOL, Washington Post, Springer, and Sky Broadcasting, ranked at the top. Since 2010, the number of investment projects has shown a steady growth.

The industry believes that 2016 is the first year of virtual reality technology, with many blockbuster products coming out, and the industry is moving beyond its embryonic stage. According to agency forecasts, global shipments of virtual reality devices are expected to exceed 5 million units in 2016, and the market size of virtual reality and augmented virtual reality will exceed $150 billion in 2020. The virtual reality market has huge potential in the future and will be the next trillion-level market, no less than the mobile Internet.

Domestic capital, Internet companies and large media groups have also entered the VR field. Last month, Whaley Technology, a subsidiary of China Media Holding Group, held a press conference in Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen through a VR live broadcast system. Li Ruigang, chairman of China Media and chairman of Whaley Technology, proposed at the press conference that "technology research and development" will become the third gene of China Media after project investment and industrial operation, and the third focus after content innovation and platform development, and started to build the "CMC Media Innovation Laboratory".

As the first lineup of CMC's "technological geneization", its subsidiary Whale Technology has released a strategic layout for the entire VR value chain covering technological innovation, equipment research and development, and content creative production. With its self-developed VR cameras and VR headsets, it has established a 1 billion yuan VR innovation industry fund, created a geek innovation team of 1,000 people, and created 10,000 hours of VR quality content including games, variety shows, live broadcasts, panoramic short films, documentaries, and micro-films. In addition, it will break through the existing technological limitations within two years and produce standard VR movies and TV series products. Chinese Culture and Whale Technology will strive to become industry leaders in the VR landscape where many competitors are competing.

It is reported that CMC is one of the earliest companies in China to enter the VR field and maintains close cooperation with many VR leaders in Silicon Valley. In early 2015, CMC and Disney jointly invested in Jaunt, becoming the earliest Chinese investor to enter the top international VR companies.

Technology + Media: The Next Trend in Home Entertainment

Internet Hotspot: Now many investors and media are entering the VR field. What do you think are your own advantages?

Li Huaiyu: Everyone knows that Whale is owned by CMC, and CMC is engaged in content. CMC's first project was to acquire Star TV in the United States. Star TV was a satellite built by Richard Li 15 years ago. Later, Murdoch had a wish to have a satellite that would never stop covering the world's live broadcast network. About twelve or thirteen years ago, they bought the license from Richard Li. Murdoch has made a lot of media investments and attempts in China. After trying, he found that he had lost money for ten years. So our first project started from here. Media + technology is a big difference between our team and other teams.

Mr. Li Ruigang has always been a leader in the media. I myself have a technical background. When I was working at BesTV, I was also driven by technology. Internet technology can always profoundly drive the rise of a new industry. So our team is a media and technology team, which is a very rare combination in the industry.

Internet Hotspot: Although the combination is strange, what are your plans in the field of VR?

Li Huaiyu: The source of VR development is a technological breakthrough, but it will eventually become a media behavior. As long as people feel that this is an unprecedented media experience, there will be more audiences and this business model can be established. It is definitely the media and content that make technology valuable.

Internet Hotspot: Many large companies in the world started investing in the VR field in 2010. Don’t you think it’s a bit late to invest in VR now?

Li Huaiyu: From a commercial perspective, it is still in the very early stages. It is even a bit like when the Internet was just starting 20 years ago. I graduated from graduate school in 1996, when the Internet was just starting out. At the beginning, there was no content, and everyone was building the network.

So when VR appeared, first, it was in its early stages, and second, I felt that the young were formidable. Third, both the Internet giants in China and the United States started from scratch and became the monopolies they are today. Everyone knows the huge disruptive power that a startup can bring, and they also know the huge benefits that come from monopolizing an industry. Therefore, all the big Internet companies are particularly afraid that new companies will use VR technology to disrupt them. Whether it is Facebook, Google, Amazon, or China's BAT, they have all taken billions of dollars to start investing in VR. In the next three to five years, VR will have a very rapid growth. And when we think that many technologies have developed to a relatively stable level, something new will suddenly appear and mess up the whole world, and everyone will start to feel a little uneasy again. This is the reincarnation brought about by technology again and again.

The people who invested in Zhang Chaoyang also entered the VR field

Internet Hotspot: You are a veteran in the media industry. Can you analyze the current media environment and the prospects that VR can bring?

Li Huaiyu: Not long ago, we joined the MIT Media Lab and became allies. The founder of this media lab was also Zhang Chaoyang's angel investor. This old man was a pioneer in the early days of the Internet in the United States. This old man also proposed in the 1990s that people would no longer read newspapers and books in the future. This was a very bold prediction in the early 1990s. No one thought that this day would come. What about now? In terms of usage time and market usage, paper media is completely dead. The last stubborn one is television, which has also been surpassed by the Internet, and this surpassing is definitely an irreversible trend. The Internet will grow bigger and bigger in the future.

Internet Hotspot: Don’t you think VR is already a bubble?

Li Huaiyu: To answer this question, let's review the history of the media. Television was introduced in the 1950s, and videotapes were introduced in the 1970s. Cable networks were introduced in the 1970s. Later, we can see that video on demand and other things are getting faster and faster, so in fact, the entire media, the Internet technology, and its development have led to huge changes in our media industry. In fact, we are also thinking about why these foreign media giants are also powerless in the Internet war. You can see that at this point, when cable networks appeared and satellite live broadcasts appeared, the media industry was also very afraid. Cable networks were also very barbaric at the beginning. It is a bit similar in the United States and China. At the beginning, it was not done by TV stations. At the beginning, it was in the community, blocked by mountains, and the TV signal was not good, so they built a small cable system there. In order to have some content at the time, they were even bored to the point of putting a camera on the telephone pole at the intersection to broadcast the traffic conditions at the intersection. At first, no one was optimistic.

Later, in the early 1980s, everyone suddenly felt that this was a thing, and cable networks would change everyone. Some of the big media groups we are familiar with today were born after the emergence of cable networks, such as CNN and Disney. These channels were born after the emergence of cable networks. Cable networks also had a great impact on the entire media industry at that time, so at that time, giants such as Time Warner invested all their efforts in cable networks. Later, there was a bubble like the Internet bubble in 1999, because everyone was doing it, so there was a bubble. But in the end, you will find that after the stability in the 1990s, all of these were acquired by large media companies. These cable networks and media companies finally merged. After the merger, these contents still belonged to large media companies. So in the last round of cable network reform, media companies finally controlled the content on the entire cable network through capital integration and asset operation. But after the rise of this round of the Internet, because its speed is too fast, it did not give media companies enough time to learn, and the executives of media companies have no way to learn these things about the Internet. So we often remind ourselves whether we have the ability to learn fast enough, because if we don’t have the ability to learn, we will soon be eliminated.

In a word, technology makes media cooler and should make life better, which is also our vision.

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.