Going to Nanyang and entering Africa, Chinese enterprises take advantage of their strength to break into the world

In a live broadcast room in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, a beautiful anchor in front of the pink background wall is working hard to recommend goods, and the cute dolls placed on the side add a little life to the live broadcast room.

In addition to the popular TikTok live broadcast room, Shopee in Southeast Asia, Amazon, Walmart in North America, Jumia in Africa and Trendyol in Turkey, these e-commerce platforms have successively added live broadcast functions.

If you count from the "Thousand Broadcasts War" around 2015, China's live broadcast technology has developed for nearly a decade. In the pan-entertainment overseas track, Chinese manufacturers have performed well by virtue of their technological advantages, and there are leaders in subdivisions such as Nonolive, Mico, Yalla, Hago, Bigo, StarMaker, Blued, Boomplay, etc., as well as To B audio and video service providers such as Belive and Yunxi Live.

As Frank, head of Yunxi Live overseas, said, "China's live broadcast technology can be said to be 3-5 years ahead of Southeast Asia and 5-8 years ahead of Europe and the United States. "Yunxi Live has a lot of experience in live broadcast hardware research and development and SaaS development capabilities, and its business has covered many countries and regions around the world, and the underlying technology it uses comes from Tencent Cloud.

Tencent Cloud has been carrying out overseas business since 2016, exporting mature products and technologies polished in the domestic market to overseas, and escorting Chinese enterprises to the sea with the hard power of audio and video technology that has been practiced in China for many years. With the deepening of the integration of audio and video technology and industry, Tencent Cloud will also bring more opportunities for the overseas development of live streaming e-commerce.

Lower Nanyang

When Chen Dezhuan founded BeLive in Singapore in 2016, there were already "fights" among Chinese live players in Southeast Asia, such as Altran UpLive, Cheetah's LiveMe, Bigo, Nonolive, Elelive, MeMe, etc., all of which were deeply cultivated here.

However, the network infrastructure in Southeast Asia is much worse than that in China, and the traffic cost is not low, and the network problem has become an urgent problem for overseas manufacturers to solve at that time. Chen Dezhuan recalled that time, saying: "When doing live broadcasting, you need high definition and low latency, which requires high network fluency and stability. For example, users in Indonesia usually do not watch live broadcasts without WiFi. ”

With the development of live streaming e-commerce in China, BeLive has also noticed the growing live shopping trend in Southeast Asia, and in 2020, BeLive decided to offer their live streaming function and short video function to enterprises.

At the beginning of its establishment, BeLive used overseas cloud vendors, but when transforming into B2B video solutions, BeLive found that at the technical level, these overseas cloud vendors did not focus on video and live broadcast capabilities. In particular, solutions in the field of live streaming support less vision and relatively single functions.

The customer needs faced by BeLive are very diverse, Chen Dezhuan told Zhixiang to go overseas: "Most customers not only want to do live broadcast on one platform, they need to provide the function of 'simultaneous play', Tencent Cloud's technology can achieve a live broadcast on 8 social platforms and e-commerce platforms at the same time, which is actually a very unique ability." ”

Relying on the capabilities of Tencent Cloud Audio and Video, BeLive has helped e-commerce platforms such as Rakuten, Trendyol, and Jumia load short video and live broadcast functions.

Like BeLive, Tencent Cloud's experience in the audio and video field is also Yunxi Live. Frank, head of Yunxi Live's overseas business, said: "Tencent Cloud has servers in some remote areas around the world, which can ensure that we have good live broadcast quality, and we do not need to build our own cloud live broadcast servers. ”

In addition, Tencent Cloud's multi-network aggregation feature has helped Yunxi Live obtain stable and reliable network services overseas. Through technical means, 5G, 4G, WAN, Wi-Fi, satellite and other types of networks are intelligently aggregated, providing users with more stable, fast and larger bandwidth network services.

Yunxi Live has been deeply engaged in the live broadcast industry for 7 years, and is one of the few national high-tech enterprises in China that has mastered both live broadcast hardware research and development and SaaS development capabilities. In the second half of 2021, Yunxi Live's domestic business has leveraged Tencent Cloud's technical advantages in IoT, audio and video, and SaaS collaboration to provide one-stop live streaming services for live streaming merchants in terms of scenario expansion and live broadcast energy efficiency.

In August 2022, when launching the software and hardware system for vertical live broadcast SaaS services for the Southeast Asian market, Yunxi Live once again chose Tencent Cloud.

Frank mentioned: "In addition to network protection, the cloud editing function and delayed resumption function we provide in the live broadcast are all basic audio and video capabilities that Tencent Cloud itself has, and they can be used directly. ”

Into Africa

With the popularity of the mobile Internet, the trend of short video and live broadcast has also moved to the African continent with the footsteps of Chinese Internet companies going overseas. In this emerging region, known as the "last billion-level blue ocean market", Chinese company Transsion has made great progress and become the king of African mobile phones.

Relying on the market share of smartphone devices, Transsion has also become a well-deserved traffic king in Africa, incubating many African head applications such as Boomplay, talktalk, Scooper, and Phoenix. However, even if it is as strong as TRANSSION, Boomplay, the largest music streaming platform in Africa, is still facing a dilemma due to the weak network infrastructure on the African continent when it develops a new live streaming product Boomlive in 2022.

Back in June 2022, when Boomplay chose to access the services of an overseas cloud vendor, but encountered IM problems when building a live broadcast service, that is, there were problems such as untimely message synchronization, coupled with the poor network environment of the African market itself, the requirements for weak networks and sound quality were very high, but the cloud vendor was not very experienced in this area, and Boomplay tried to test Tencent Cloud in September with service advantages that were more in line with the company's needs.

The main reason why Boomplay chose to cooperate with Tencent Cloud is that TME is very well-known in the music industry, and the streaming services and live streaming services provided by Tencent Cloud are highly compatible with Boomplay's business, Boomplay product director Park Dongsheng said: "Using Tencent Cloud can build our own live streaming products very quickly." Some overseas cloud service providers, their TRTC and IM services are relatively independent, and they don't even have functions such as interactive gifts that are common in domestic live broadcast rooms. But Tencent Cloud Services has many domestic live streaming companies, and they have the ability to do so. ”

In fact, when Boomplay tried to switch cloud services, it chose many providers and chose to test with Tencent Cloud after comprehensive consideration. During the entire testing process, Boomplay was also very cautious, they first found many local anchors to participate in the test, and after finding that they were quite satisfied with the results of the test, they officially connected to Tencent Cloud's services in November.

In response to the poor local network environment in Africa, Boomplay and the Tencent Cloud team did a lot of tests, "The problem we encountered when cooperating with other cloud vendors before was that there were some messages that could not be displayed synchronously, and the latency was very high, and finally we found that for the optimization of weak networks, the algorithm of the Tencent Cloud team has a strong ability to optimize this piece." "After we connected to Tencent Cloud's IM service, we found that it not only has a wealth of message types, but also provides some custom message capabilities. Previously, we also tested some domestic manufacturers that do TRTC services particularly well, but we think the advantages of Tencent Cloud are very obvious. ”

Boomplay has to face not only the problem of poor network environment and inevitable delay, Africa also has a feature of user terminal equipment models, that is, the equipment used by local anchors in Africa is uneven, and African anchors will not specifically find a live broadcast room to live broadcast, the live broadcast environment is very complex, which puts forward higher requirements for the processing of sound quality.

"Speech delay and noise handling, these are several key points of user feedback when we first launched the live broadcast, and the speech delay will affect our subsequent chorus function, and everyone cannot interact. In addition, there are few local WiFi environments, most people use data traffic, and traffic is a relatively heavy cost of living for locals, so we need to reduce data consumption as much as possible in live broadcasts. These three points are all very good performance of Tencent Cloud, some of which are gradually tuned in the process of our cooperation, and their service attitude and problem-solving ability, I think are very good. Park Dongsheng said.

Send experience

To paraphrase the time machine theory put forward by SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son, replicating those Internet models that have been verified in China to emerging markets such as Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Africa will have a greater chance of success. In the past decade or so, Chinese overseas enterprises have followed suit, whether they go to Nanyang or into Africa, they regard Copy from China as a "martial arts secret".

Qiu Yuepeng, Vice President of Tencent, COO of Tencent Cloud and Smart Industry Business Group, and President of Tencent Cloud, pointed out: "Everyone attaches great importance to the innovation of China's entire business model, and also attaches great importance to learning and understanding, not only technical needs, but also many Japanese, Korean and Southeast Asian companies are still looking at the changes in China's business form." ”

In the field of audio and video technology, Tencent Cloud is undoubtedly one of the leaders, because Tencent itself is a big user of audio and video technology. Since the launch of QQ, Tencent has been developing its own audio and video communication technology, which has been more than 20 years. As Yang Baoshu, senior vice president of Tencent Cloud International, said: "Tencent is not only here to sell clouds, but also to share experience. Tencent itself has many different apps and different ecosystems, and we can bring our experience to customers in the maritime industry. ”

It is said that Tencent QQ has a special team to develop two-way video call function very early, and this team is the predecessor of Tencent Cloud audio and video team, their original task is to support the audio and video needs of Tencent's internal business lines, and only gradually exported after 2015, and launched overseas business in 2016. At present, Tencent Cloud has ranked first in the IDC video cloud solution market for five consecutive years, covering audio and video PaaS (real-time interactive trtc, instant messaging IM, media processing MPS, on-demand, cloud live broadcast) and edge security acceleration (EdgeOne).

Taking Tencent Meeting, which is commonly used for remote meetings, as an example, its underlying capabilities are audio and video capabilities. In the past few years of Tencent Meeting, because of the large number of user applications, Tencent has made great progress in audio and video technology, "There was no such large-scale and hundreds of millions of people to meet before, especially real-time meetings such as Tencent Meeting, which used to be more on-demand and live broadcasting." I believe this is also the reason why compared with some international manufacturers, people still think we are the best. Qiu Yuepeng said.

In addition to the experience accumulated at the technical level, Tencent Cloud has also accumulated localization experience in the process of serving overseas customers, and Tencent Cloud has given the localization team more authorization to help customers adjust and optimize in a more realistic way. "For example, the avatar function, Japan and South Korea have two-dimensional and anime culture, many UP masters do not use real avatars, and some simply replace them with two-dimensional anime. For example, there is a local customer who needs to translate English with different accents in the local area, which is a very interesting demand and reflects cultural diversity. Li Yutao, vice president of Tencent Cloud, introduced.

On the other hand, Tencent Cloud is also using its own ecological partnership to help Chinese overseas enterprises go global. According to Chen Dezhuan, Tencent Cloud introduced BeLive to at least 4 large-scale customers from Japan and Southeast Asia. Now BeLive's business development mainly relies on the partner ecosystem.

Relying on the hard power of audio and video technology, Tencent Cloud can not only use its rich experience to help overseas enterprises develop their business smoothly, but also witness the rise of China's overseas ecosystem.