《Lao Duan said: Ultra-HD box》

Duan Youqiao, an iQiyi artist, today I suddenly wanted to use the HD box as a clue to take a peek at the 15-year development of Chinese boxes. They are all real people and real stories. Any similarities are definitely not coincidental. However, what I hope most is that you read it with the mentality of watching "Story Club". As for the HD box, it can be regarded as the first embedded advertisement.

Today, there was a media sharing session for the launch of the ultra-high definition box.

Li Zhenning of Galaxy, Chang Baocheng of Skyworth, and Xu Lei of JD.com and I joked: Today's Internet TV is in full swing. If an Internet company does not make a box, it will feel embarrassed. BAT is now involved in OTT. But based on my experience of fifteen years of separation and reunion with the box, the box is definitely not a piece of Tang Monk's meat! We are a team that wants to get the true scriptures of OTT together: Mr. Li is the master, because he only has OTT business and must have the most faith, Mr. Chang is the eldest brother, because Skyworth was the first to make boxes, and Mr. Xu can only be the third brother. Although e-commerce is powerful, in terms of box qualifications, JD.com is still the latest! Haha, look at your face in the mirror: I, I, can only be the second brother, and finally Mr. Xu's hanging heart is calm!

299x3=299 yuan!

This 299 yuan box, which comes with a 299 yuan JD coupon, an 8G USB drive, and iQiyi mobile VIP push-screen video service, will be available for pre-sale tomorrow. In this first year of the Internet where cheap is beautiful, what people should worry about is not that no one will buy it, but that too many people will buy it. Just like when I watch Xiaomi TV, LeTV TV, TV+, and Coocaa TV, I only look at one thing: whoever sells more, the one who sells more can be a real TV. You know the reason!

Today, the ultra-high-definition box is on the market.

The first time I saw a box was fifteen years ago when I went to the Television Electroacoustic Research Institute with Wu Bo from Yinglichi and Gong Yu from Focus.com to meet Guo Ke and Chen Ke. That dark thing was called STB, a set-top box. They said it was the future of video. I smiled and didn't dare to say anything, but things change over time. Five years later, in 2002, I actually entered the digital TV industry. Now it has been more than ten years.

The first time I seriously thought about making an OTT box was in 2009 when I was at Skyworth. At that time, I registered a domain name called i-DVD, because I thought that promoting a new video terminal should not be called OTT, which was very unpopular at the time, but should be called Internet-style DVD, which is more popular. Later in 2010, together with Lin Sen and Jiang Wen from Chaoge, we came up with a name called "Dami Box". At that time, there was no Xiaomi Box. Everyone thought that "Xiaomi is a mobile phone, and rice is a box". The company was called Dami Video, and later merged into Yishiteng, one of the shareholders of Future TV under CNTV.

From 2010 to 2012, OTT has been brewing. It was not until the second half of 2012 that OTT set-top boxes really became popular. Various set-top boxes have emerged one after another. Regarding the ID appearance design, our partners were almost the first in China to want to make them in multiple colors. As early as the first generation of rice boxes in 2011, they were colorful. The prototype of the Galaxy Jupiter box in 2012 was also colorful. I still remember that He Hao, the general manager of Shenzhen Hackers, and Feng Shan, the technical director, showed us the prototype design of the later Wasu Rainbow Box in the second half of 2012. This was a very dreamy plan. The tripod shape that was later changed by Alibaba and Wasu was exactly the essence in my eyes. Maybe Hangzhou’s design concept is more introverted in the south of the Yangtze River. Of course, there are people around me who like this more. The reason why BesTV’s Xiaohong and Tongzhou’s Xiaobai are not included is that although they are not black, they are not colorful if they only have one color. The first prototype of the Xiaomi Mi Box I saw was white. I don’t know if it was intentional. I didn’t ask Dai Qingsong and Wang Chuan about this later. Recently, Wang Chuan also posted a colorful box design online. I don’t know if there is any deep meaning. (I randomly found dozens of molds that were sprayed with colored covers at that time. These are all discarded, and none of the colors were used! None of the 7 colors that were finally launched on the market were among them)

Actually, it is not easy to make it colorful instead of black to overcome the problem of the black appearance of the remote control receiving frame. I am particularly opposed to opening a small black window on a colorful box. If it must be done, it is better to be completely black. It is too functional and ugly! Of course, this design is also very popular in 798 today. Therefore, we finally adopted the design of the base below, which was completely black, and by the way solved the problem of the 180-degree infrared remote control angle. In addition, a pure color box next to the TV is also a bit floating.

I have always believed that color is human nature, and the box should be colorful. This is the most basic part of personalization and the basis for box differentiation. But the problem with color is that if the craftsmanship is poor, it will look very fake, and it is not as good as white and black. Most of the colors made by molds have a strong sense of fake plastic, both in appearance and feel. As a set-top box product, in addition to "adaptability" and "differentiation", how to reflect "sense of value" is the key, which is "weight" and "metal texture". Some colors, such as iQiyi green, are difficult to adjust to a metallic texture. This has caused Skyworth CTO Wang Xiaohui, who pursues the ultimate in technology, to scrap at least N shells, three digits. PPS orange is very easy to adjust to a more beautiful metallic texture. Congratulations to Zhang Hongyu and Xu Weifeng. If the PPS LOGO can be more orange, a realistic metal box can be made. Including the "tycoon gold" demonstrated at the launch today, in fact, there is no essential difference from the previous sand gold, but because it is made by Apple, it has become popular this year. We also copied it by the way, haha, the effect is not bad! In addition to the metallic texture of the color, weight is also an indispensable matching point. Therefore, this rounded cube set-top box with a width of only 90 mm and a height of 20 mm weighs 234 grams, which is almost the same as the APPLE TV without the power module. It feels great to hold it in your hands and look at it! In addition, the outer and inner packaging of the ultra-clear box are all in white, hot silver, and gray. This matches the metallic texture of the box very well. I like the five small boxes in the shape of the Buddhist swastika after opening the top cover. There is a small space in the middle that can be used as a handle for the small inner packaging box. Also, the designers struggled for a long time to place these five internal accessories. I have seen so many boxes, but only the HD box and the Xiaomi box are the Xiaomi 2nd generation boxes. The inner packaging has almost no "extra contents designed to match the shape" and almost no "remaining space that cannot be filled". Of course, there is still a small flaw left. The inner packaging of the HD box and the Xiaomi 2nd generation box also has a small irregular package (of course, the designer of Xiaomi 2 is more difficult, because the Xiaomi box itself is irregular, and the front and back are not the same height, which makes it more difficult to design!). There is only this one left! I guess Xiaomi designers, like Skyworth and iQiyi designers, did not solve this problem in the end. Whoever solves it will be awarded the "Nobel Prize for Set-Top Box Package Design". I have also thought about it for a long time, and in this very conceited field, I still gave up helplessly in the end.

Regarding the metallic texture of the color, I have made a comparison with Apple products: the colors of the IPOD and NANO back then were very metallic, very outstanding and excellent. The color of the recent IPHONE5C is actually very beautiful, and it is actually better than the products of that year in terms of color alone, but because it feels too plastic, the texture is very low-end! It's a pity that Apple has made other unknown efforts on this color. I can't find the sense of value in my hand. I think this should be one of the reasons why the sales of this 5C are not as good as expected. In the past few thousand years since humans invented bronze, metal has always been a material with strong value and use value. Even Apple is difficult to change this, not to mention Cook after Mr. Steve Jobs left.

I have written so much, but I have not written about the function of the box. The color has no use value for the function. But this is one of the indispensable links in product design. If you want to make a product with a truly ultimate user experience, users will not buy it without these thoughts and efforts on color. In this regard, Apple is a role model. For example, the IPAD has changed from black to gray. If you think about it carefully, it is very interesting! Samsung, which is equally successful and may be more successful than Apple in the future, is not a particularly good role model in my eyes. LOGO, JD is red, iQiyi is green, and Skyworth is blue, which happens to be the three primary colors. This should really be a coincidence!

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.