Alibaba GroupVice President Chang Yang
On September 5, the China Cultural Industry Development Summit Forum was held at the National Convention Center. Chang Yang, vice president of Alibaba Group, delivered a speech entitled “Building a “New Infrastructure” for Entertainment to Help the Inclusive Development of the Industry”. He pointed out that under a complex ecosystem, there are three trends in the development of the entertainment industry: IP commercialization and commercial IP, integrated development of online and offline, and new momentum for digital entertainment infrastructure construction.
According to Chang Yang, as of March 2020, the number of online video (including short videos) users in China reached 850 million, and the Chinese entertainment industry has a huge market.
“The continued supply of quality content is one of the driving forces for the development of the entertainment market.” Chang Yang said that in the past year, Ali Entertainment actively participated in the content field. It participated in the investment and production of a number of box-office movies such as “Traffic Earth,” “My Motherland and Me,” “Captain China,” “Hero of Fire,” and “You as a Teenager.” In terms of variety shows, there are phenomenal works such as “12 Hours in Changan” and “This is Street Dance.”
Ali Group is exploring new technologies to promote the digital production of LED virtual dynamic solutions, digital promotion of the Lighthouse Professional Edition, and the “paperless” electronic ticket performance infrastructure in Barley. In response, Chang Yang said that Alibaba will continue to provide digital integration capabilities to the entertainment industry with Alibaba Cloud's underlying data platform based on artificial intelligence, big data, and the underlying technology of cloud computing, and a complete digital ecosystem.
Below is the full text of the speech:
[New opportunities for the entertainment industry in the post-pandemic era]
The pandemic has triggered a short-term economic downturn. What kind of challenges and opportunities will we face?
The “lipstick effect” occurred during the US economic depression in the 1930s. One manifestation was that the entertainment industry bucked the trend, thus making Chaplin and his great cinematic art. Hollywood emerged during the American war era; the 1997 Asian financial turmoil enabled the Korean entertainment industry to develop by leaps and bounds; while large technology companies and entertainment industry stocks performed better than most stocks during the COVID-19 period, streaming media giantsNetflixThe company's paid subscription growth surged by 10 million in the second quarter, and the stock price surpassed $570 in July, a record high. The greater the economic pressure, the greater the need for people to seek comfort and encouragement in cultural and entertainment products, thus spawning a huge consumer market. Many countries and regions are seizing opportunities from the entertainment industry in the midst of a trough, thus gaining leaps and bounds.
Let's look at the domestic situation. For three consecutive years, the per capita consumption expenditure on education, culture and entertainment of urban residents has stabilized at around 7.8% of disposable income. In 2019, per capita consumption of education, culture and entertainment exceeded 3,000 yuan, growing strongly, with a growth rate of nearly 12%. Relying on strong consumption growth potential, the consumption scale of the entertainment market is expected to continue to rise. In 2019, the number of movie viewers in theaters in China reached 1.73 billion, with a total box office of 64.3 billion. As of March 2020, the number of online video (including short videos) users in China reached 850 million.
With such opportunities, so many users, and such a large market, we need more new content, more advanced new technology, and a new business format more suitable for development.
[New content: growth position for high-quality content]
(1) Increase content investment
The continued supply of high-quality content is one of the driving forces for the development of the entertainment market. In the past year, Alibaba Entertainment's achievements in the field of content are obvious to all.Alibaba PicturesIt participated in the investment and production of a number of box-office movies such as “Traffic Earth,” “My Motherland and Me,” “Captain China,” “Hero of Fire,” and “You as a Teenager.” In terms of variety shows, there are phenomenal works such as “12 Hours in Changan” and “This Is Street Dance.”
Alibaba Entertainment continues to increase its investment in high-quality content. On the one hand, through copyright procurement, it has been upgraded from a “leasing” model to a “property rights” model, and the proportion of long-term copyright is increasing year by year. On the other hand, introducing senior producers from the industry to incubate their own series of IP content through self-production and joint production is a key direction in the future.
(2) Support quality content and creators
We've been working hard to drive quality content creation for a few years. In November 2018, Alibaba Pictures announced the “Jincheng Joint Production Program” to support young directors and screenwriters in collaboration with first-class production teams as the lead pitcher, main controller, or publisher. Within five years, we will launch 20 co-produced movies, which will be broadcast on the four most popular Chinese New Year, Spring Festival, Summer, and National Day movies. The first film of the “Golden Orange Joint Production Project” was “Peppa Pig for the New Year”, and it submitted good answers.
In 2019, for online movies, we also launched the “Splendid Project”. In cooperation with first-class online movie companies, we will provide our partners with comprehensive financial, data, and marketing support. Six leading online movie companies in the industry, including Taomeng, Strange Tree Fish, New Studios, Zhongle, Xiang Brothers, and Rabbit Hole, have become the first partners.
In October 2015, Alibaba Pictures cooperatedYouku Tudou, Beijing Film Academy, Communication University of China,Giants NetworkA number of partners, such as New Studios, etc., jointly launched Plan A, which targets the world, explores young film talents, and cultivates top A-level talents for the entire industry.
In August 2020, Youku Culture and Alibaba Pictures launched a joint initiative to provide full-link support for high-quality documentary films from investment, production to promotion and broadcast. The Iron Facts Documentary Film Cultivation Program is the only cultivation program for documentary films in China. It addresses a series of difficult problems such as difficulties in finding investment for documentaries, incompatibility between commercial theaters and documentaries, and limited promotion resources, and reconstructs a sustainable and healthy development path for documentary films from a systematic and source. Bring good works to the international cultural stage and tell good stories about China. World-class documentary master Frederick Wiseman (Frederick Wiseman) was invited as the lifelong honorary chairman of the program.
(3) Offline and online linkage of live performances
Under the pandemic, we are working hard to explore the online live performance industry. During the pandemic, the performance industry received almost no revenue for several months in a row. Even though the current theater's occupancy rate has recovered to 50%, it is still struggling with its lifeline.
In April 2020, when the epidemic was severe and the overall mood in the entertainment industry was sluggish, Alibaba Entertainment's Damai linked Weibo,NetEaseCloud music, shrimp music,Tencent MusicThe Entertainment Group jointly launched the “Trust the Future” charity show. Youku is responsible for content production. More than 130 musicians, including established singers such as Faye Wong, Na Ying, and Lao Lang, and new generation singers such as Wang Junkai, Wu Yifan, and Yi Yi Qian Xi joined the charity show. Bringing confidence and encouragement to the industry.
“Trust in the future” is public welfare rather than commerce. Finding a commercial model for online performances is the key to keeping the industry alive. To this end, Damai quickly launched a “parallel wheat live” for online performances, experimenting with the monetization of online concert content, while promoting the online development of dramas, and helping the online development of high-quality repertoire and partners through capacity building such as operation, promotion, and live streaming of Damai. On May 30 and July 26, Damai's “Parallel Mai Live” successively created two super online concerts, Hao Yun and Naiwan. Among them, Naiwan Super's online concert has already achieved profits by relying on monetization channels such as fan packs, peripheral products, and brand names.
Parallel live performances did not simply move offline performances online; instead, various models were innovated: content innovation, multiple scenes, light variety forms; interactive innovation, barrage, rewards, cheering, real-time voting, online ordering, paid special effects, online streaming, etc.; business model innovation: guaranteed sharing, brand sponsorship. More importantly, we have created an unrivaled viewing experience for users: 4k cinematic image quality, restoration of the scene; studio sound effects, immersive sound; frame sharing technology guarantees an impressive experience for OTT large-screen members. As a result, “Parallel Mic Live” explores various performances and star theaters to break time and space limitations, and create a parallel, high-quality, and high-standard super online performance model online.
In June 2020, at a large-scale performance event celebrating the 68th anniversary of the Beijing Arts Academy, Damai and Youku were the chief live streaming partners and were fully responsible for the planning, production and promotion of live streaming content, and the entire network broadcast volume exceeded 500w. Geometric level has increased the dissemination of Beijing's leading talent art content in China.
According to statistics, at the end of 2019, the national culture and tourism system had 2,072 performing arts groups. As a platform, we will continue to explore the integration of online and offline performances to serve the entire industry.
(4) Content IP mining
Driven by the hit broadcast of the 2019 Youku homemade drama “Changan 12:00”Xian travelThere has been a sharp rise, and there are already successful cases of popular IPs driving local tourism. So, can we go one step further and make a new IP+ travel business card?
On August 12, 2020, the Alibaba Entertainment Film and Television Base officially signed an agreement in Zhouzhuang, the “China's No. 1 Water Town”. The film and television base includes various sectors such as the film and television industry, film and television tourism, and film and television support. After completion, it will use “Qingming River Map” as the design background. After completion, it may become the most realistic “Song” period reality base in China, providing comprehensive, three-dimensional live scenes for domestic and foreign movies and TV dramas. With the theme of traditional Chinese culture, the base recreates the local culture and prosperity of the Song dynasty. In the future, it will gather and attract more outstanding domestic Internet IP film and television projects, build a Guofeng IP matrix, and drive the continuous operation of the film and television base and the development of the surrounding cultural tourism industry through traffic IP. Youku filmed the popular IP “Qingming River Map Code” as the first project at the film and television base. This drama is another new national suspense drama launched by Alibaba Entertainment after “12 Hours in Changan”. The goal of our efforts is to incubate the film and television industry into a benchmark case within 5 years in terms of industrialization, series content serialization, and IP operation ecology.
[New Technology: New Infrastructure Construction]
(1) Digital production - LED virtual dynamic scheme
Digital production requires digital production — with digital assets as the core, to reduce the resource consumption of film and television production through digital technology combined with virtual presentation of elements such as scenery, props, makeup, and lighting required for traditional film and television production. Alibaba Entertainment's digital solutions, on the one hand, export technical capabilities and data to the industry to help more hardware partners transform from civilian and commercial products to products specialized in digital production. On the other hand, it uses its own digital infrastructure to integrate the resources of domestic digital production partners to form an ecological effect and drive the joint development of upstream and downstream ecological partners.
Case: The LED virtual dynamic scheme uses an LED screen to play digital assets instead of traditional green screen synthesis, and can be quickly and easily applied to scenes and car scenes shot outside the window. Take a 40-episode project with over 100 million dollars as an example. The shooting cycle was shortened by 10 days and post-production was shortened by 45 days, which could save about 10% of the budget. In this way, production budgets can be saved at least hundreds of millions of yuan each year.
(2) Digital Publicity - Lighthouse Professional Edition
Lighthouse Professional Edition is a data-driven one-stop advertising platform under Alibaba Pictures. It has deconstructed the promotion process, built a distribution platform, established quantitative indicators, improved promotion efficiency, and found a “new method” of film marketing to “make the world have no difficult publicity.” It has now served more than 300 movies, and the box office for cooperative films has exceeded 50 billion, and the number of connected users has reached 750 million. In the case of “I'm Not a Medicine Man,” the point-and-shoot strategy supported the screening by estimating a ticket score of 9.4+. The recommended point-and-shoot strategy was large-scale screening to ignite the film's reputation in advance; marketing strategy support, screening research found that the audience's evaluation of emotional elements was far higher than humorous elements. It was recommended not to use comedy as the core to emphasize emotional resonance before screening.
(3) Performance infrastructure — “paperless”
In May 2019, the “paperless” e-ticket technology independently developed by Damai was unveiled: multi-function gates to verify admission, 89 gates in 3 exhibition areas, two-way entry and exit design, and completed verification within 1 second per person. The overall admission speed was 2 times higher than that of paper tickets. “Paperless” is an important means to help the digital transformation of the performance industry. Through continuous technology upgrades and the introduction of technologies such as the Internet of Things and smart hardware, Damai has overcome the difficulties of paperless technology and built a solid network infrastructure. For example, the current 4G technology solved the problem that when the basic network is crowded, all base stations around the venue will be filled up instantaneously, and the audience's mobile phones will experience insufficient signal transmission.
Going paperless also brings value-added services to users. Paper tickets will not tell the audience information about the venue, such as real-time feedback on the traffic situation at each entrance of the venue. Which door is currently at the peak of traffic, but after going paperless, the Damai client can alert and guide users to watch the show. At the same time, paperless allows the “entrance” of barley to be connected to other businesses under the Alibaba Group ecosystem, such as where convenience stores, restaurants, and parking lots are located near the entrance of the venue. Ali's Gaode Association will all tell users of barley. From the customer's perspective, after going paperless, users can get more help and value-added services than in the paper ticket era.
More importantly, paperless can prevent “scalpers” from the source to the greatest extent, because e-tickets cannot be copied, and paperless allows full real-name entry. Online ticketing must be a real user, and admission must also be a real user. Because of face recognition, others cannot replace or impersonate them. Moreover, at the transaction level, Barley uses Alibaba Ecological's security technology to monitor ticket grabbing data in real time through big data, accurately determine “scalper” behavior such as “machine brushing” and “human swiping,” and intercept them at the source of the transaction side.
[New trends in the entertainment industry]
In the post-pandemic era, traditional entertainment is accelerating the process of online and offline live performances, the integration of long and short videos is accelerating, and forms of online entertainment content such as short videos, webcasts, online animation, online literature, games, and music will further intersect. Under the complex ecosystem, we can see new trends in the development of the entertainment industry: IP commercialization and commercial IP; integrated development of online and offline; and new momentum for digital entertainment infrastructure construction.
Alibaba's Alibaba Cloud underlying data platform based on the underlying technology of artificial intelligence, big data, and cloud computing, and a complete digital ecosystem provides digital integration capabilities to the entertainment industry.
The Alibaba Entertainment sector, on the one hand, is a data-driven application of new infrastructure for entertainment. On the other hand, it highlights the mainstream value content production of “little people, positive energy, and big feelings”, creating new infrastructure for the entire industry chain, from investment services and content production to big data promotion and IP derivatives development, to promote the development of the entertainment industry. We are willing to work with all colleagues to help the whole industry create prosperity! (end)
SinaDisclaimer: All conference recordings were compiled live in shorthand. Without review by the speakers, Sina posted this article for the purpose of conveying more information, and did not imply endorsement of their views or confirmation of their descriptions.
Responsible Editor: Xue Yongwei