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In recent years, Southeast Asia has become a hot spot for Chinese enterprises and capital to go to sea, according to statistics, the GMV in the region will rise to $170 billion in 2021 and will reach $360 billion by 2025. Nowadays, capital from all over the world is constantly entering Southeast Asia, hoping to build the next technology giant here, and there are of course Chinese companies active here.
On January 12, at the first "China-Southeast Asia Innovators Summit" sponsored by Agora and hosted by Zhixiang Network, Wang Qi, head of Agora's social pan-entertainment products, shared the theme of "Real-time Interaction: Creating a High-level Game of Pan-Entertainment overseas", and introduced the opportunities and challenges of Pan-Entertainment in the Southeast Asian market.
Wang Qi, Head of Social Pan-Entertainment Products at Agora, Amonet
To this end, Zhixiang Network sorted out Wang Qi's speech, and the following is the content of his speech:
Today, I will share with you the scenes and cases of Sound Network in real-time interaction, social pan-entertainment and going to the sea, as well as our insight into the trend of pan-entertainment going to the sea, and introduce the evolution of our real-time interactive technology, and finally talk about the very hot metaverse in 2021.
Multi-scene interaction
First of all, to introduce the next SoundNet, Founded in 2014, Voice Network has accompanied the growth of many domestic and foreign enterprises related to real-time interaction. Now, the number of call minutes per month is about 50 billion, of which the most widely involved industry is social pan-entertainment, we also involve the education industry, such as online classes, small class classes and the like, as well as the IoT industry, such as the video call of the little genius phone watch, but also involved in medical and government and other industries.
As the main scene of real-time interaction, the trend we see in social pan-entertainment is that in the next generation of entertainment, social, game and live broadcast boundaries will become more and more blurred, such as in the metaverse era, a 3D application, such as 3D chat room, KTV, characters can move, jump, can do a variety of actions, and the game has been very similar, you are difficult to define whether this is a game or a social application, and then many users can also participate in the application, in fact, similar to a live broadcast that many people are watching.
The theme we talked about is going to sea, then China's application to go to sea, is gradually upgrading, from the earliest tools to go to sea, to the game represented by Lilith to go to sea, to the current content-based live broadcast and short video, as well as voice out of the sea, such as in Southeast Asia in many countries to download the top few for young people social APP, the most well-known voice social platform in the Middle East and North Africa Yala, behind the sound network technology in support. For example, the optimization of Yala voice and the adaptation of gameplay, we have carried out a lot of customized services.
The representative of the "Talk + Together X" scene is Tiya, which performed very well from the end of 2020 to the beginning of 2021, when space killing was extremely hot, and Lychee's stock price also rose very fast during that time. In 2021, due to Musk's driving effect, interactive podcasts have become the hottest scene, and many large domestic platforms want to join this scene, but they may not rise due to differences in domestic and foreign environments. So this extends, if it is going to sea, it is also necessary to understand the local policy and operating environment, as well as the user's usage habits.
In addition, there are also online K songs, various forms of video social networking, e-sports live broadcasting and other game social scenes that are very popular overseas. There is also the fitness interaction of AI, watching movies together during the epidemic... In fact, there are many cases that have gradually synchronized with domestic applications, and the gameplay and maturity have been completely matched.
In the early years, friends in the same industry would tell me that in terms of 2C application function, maturity or experience, overseas products were 3 to 5 years behind the domestic, and now look at it, the gap is actually gradually narrowing. In terms of e-commerce live broadcasting, in fact, in 2017, the GMV of the entire e-commerce live broadcast was only 30 billion, and then by 2020, it is already 1 trillion, and it is estimated that it should be more than 2 trillion in 2021, which is a very large market.
In terms of overseas trends, the revenue of the entire download and entertainment applications is continuing to grow, and the download volume is much larger than that of Apple, but the iOS side revenue is much larger than that of Android. In terms of application classification, the growth rate of entertainment applications is very high, the growth is also very significant, and the ranking of dating applications is very high.
More than 50% of the top social entertainment products include live broadcast functions. What does this mean? That is, live broadcasting has become a standard function, and social or entertainment applications can be added to live broadcasting. Judging from the ranking of the revenue of overseas manufacturers, the 14 companies on the list are related to social networking and pan-entertainment.
From the perspective of Southeast Asia, Southeast Asia is actually a must for social pan-entertainment to go global, with a large population base, application penetration rate, smartphone penetration rate data is actually very good, and income growth is also very good.
What are the characteristics of Southeast Asia? Each country has its own ethnicity, language, and currency, each country needs to carry out differentiated operations, and the proportion of the rural population is also very high, so what do you want to do? For example, there are many low-end machines, do social applications to consider power consumption, the island network environment is relatively poor, your weak network confrontation must also be done well, then the sound network actually has a polishing and adaptation of the work.
Trends: Live streaming, gamification,
Content, virtualization, globalization and full stacking
Having said all this, the key is the trend, and we will also talk about the trend with some applications as an example.
First of all, the coverage rate of live broadcasting has gradually increased. For example, among the head game manufacturers who went to the sea, FunPlus added a live broadcast function in its hottest game "State of Survival" in 2021, and then user retention and activity have increased, and even carried out a "matryoshka doll" operation, implanted live broadcast in the game, and implanted interactive games in the live broadcast, interested friends can experience it, which is very well done.
Social gamification, in fact, like Yalla's Aeroplane, and Yalla Ludo, we have experienced users, can feel the charm of two-wheel drive, such as he plays games, meets friends, can conduct voice chat, and then can team up to play games, strangers team up to play games without paying, but after becoming acquaintances, play games together, you have to pay money, which will drive users to keep knowing strange friends, which is a very classic case of combining games with social networking.
In terms of content, it is also our focus next year, and we will increase the empowerment of content on the basis of RTC. In fact, we did RTC for K songs in 2021, and also synchronized the lyrics of the songs, scoring, recording, and playback, and talked about the copyright of many songs.
This brings us to contentization, so what is contentization? Your social network is to have content, like the previous traditional live broadcast, the anchor in front of the screen awkward chat, in fact, can not talk for long, rely on the value of the face can not last so long, and there will be homogenization, more boring. The conversation scene is similar, what are we going to do? We have to add content in these social scenes, games are a kind of content, what else is there besides games? Short videos, music, these are actually verified, and then like movies, event clips, are all content, are the direction that can be considered.
Then there is virtualization, in fact, many social platforms have long been able to provide this kind of virtual live broadcast, but through the sticker to achieve, sticker and the whole person's virtualization, the technology behind is still not the same, the sticker immersion is not so strong.
There is also a very important trend, that is, globalization, which is very technically demanding. When global users communicate, they need products to do cross-regional direct connection, and this intermediate technology has more things to consider, unlike a local application in Thailand, as long as the interconnection of users in Thailand is supported, and the upgrade requirements for culture and gameplay are also very much.
In addition, it is full-stack, the Philippine social product Kumu is full-stacked, which has both live broadcasts and multi-person PK chats, similar to China's Momo, such as Momo will do werewolf killing, live broadcasting, and blind dates.
The logic of technological evolution
About the technological evolution of SoundNet, first of all, SoundNet has deployed a lot of nodes in the world, many products do cross-regional direct connection or go to sea, if you encounter network problems, you will need to have a very deep accumulation of resources, it is very uneconomical to do server deployment and debugging and tuning, then SoundNet's technology can help these enterprises easily build stable and reliable real-time interactive scenes, helping multiple businesses go to sea.
We have invested a lot of energy in the performance of the anti-weak network. For example, in the island or other places where the network environment is very poor, SoundNet can provide end-to-end smoother audio and video calls, and our beauty and bel canto technologies are gradually optimized.
We have also been doing things to lower the threshold, in terms of full platform compatibility, we have done it very early, and we can currently adapt to more than 20,000 mobile terminals, which can ensure a consistent real-time interactive experience for global users.
Security compliance certification to expand to say, overseas regulations are actually very strict, like GDPR and a series of certifications, if not done, to do social entertainment will be a headache. The audio and video services provided by SoundNet have passed the relevant safety compliance certifications, and in the field of real-time interaction, our security compliance is the most comprehensive.
The "Dream Compensation" of the Metacosm
Finally, let's talk about the information revolution and the metacosm.
We are comparing many things in our daily life, through social comparison to do self-positioning and goal setting, we also do some psychological compensation through "fiction", just like playing games, why do we like to play games? Because in my daily life, I can't send out turtle qigong, I can't fly the royal sword, so I want to make up for my dreams in the game.
In fact, the logic behind the metaverse is the same as it is, you can really have a new identity in the virtual world after the iteration of decentralized identity, which makes you self-identify very strong.
Now we can't predict what the future metaverse will be like, just like traveling back to tell the people of the 19th century that the future network tip will be very red, the anchor will be very red, he can't understand it at all, but the logic behind it can be common, there are some general directions, we know what we can do, such as XR, social, virtual people, games and blockchain and so on.
Atonet Agora RTE-XR ecological panorama
The metacosm is no longer an unattainable star, from the perspective of investment and financing, it has become a mountain that we can already see, we can go towards it, this road is inevitably full of thorns, so what kind of road can we choose?
There are some paths that are more certain and the risk will be relatively small, such as XR. Now, the sales volume of VR equipment is very large, and there are more and more applications, such as many applications that cooperate with SoundNet are in the layout, including conferences, VR KTV, VR chat room, the opportunity is actually relatively clear.
For this cutting-edge innovation track, SoundNet is also about to launch a series of scene services that combine 3D and VR. For example, in the conversation room with spatial audio, or add the function of voiceprint change. It's like if you're a ninja in the game, then we can provide ninja voices to bring a stronger sense of immersion to the user.