Shulou(Shulou.com)06/02 Report--

Aliyun and Tencent Cloud, two domestic cloud computing giants, have their own basic disks. If Aliyun's basic disks are e-commerce cloud and financial cloud, then Tencent Cloud's basic disks are video cloud and game cloud. These two clouds are still the main contributors to Tencent Cloud's revenue.

Tencent Video Cloud team was born in QQ audio and video business. Since QQ released the video chat feature in 2002, QQ's audio and video capabilities have been continuously improved, laying a technical line for developing video cloud business in the future. Another technical line of video cloud comes from Tencent Video's accumulation of CDN (content distribution).

Compared with other cloud service providers, years of accumulated audio / video and CDN capabilities have given Tencent Cloud a significant first-mover advantage in the video cloud field.

Although Tencent Cloud is strong, it does not outshine others.

In December 2014, Tencent opened its audio and video capabilities to enterprise-level services, and then continuously improved its product system and expanded its business to application scenarios such as VOD, LVB, ILVB and IM, relying on the global distribution network and massive transcoding equipment. End-to-end solutions form comprehensive capability advantages.

In the video cloud market, all the first-mover advantages of Tencent Cloud are eventually transformed into market competitiveness, helping it to strengthen its leading position in the market.

However, although Tencent Cloud is strong, it has never been able to pull too wide a gap with its competitors.

Since 2013, with the rapid popularity of smartphones, mobile video has sprung up. In 2014, Tencent Cloud began to provide video cloud services to the outside world, and shortly after that, cloud service providers such as Jinshanyun and UCloud, as well as traditional CDN vendors such as online hostel, also began to provide video cloud services, flooding into the video cloud market.

In addition to these competitors, old rivals Aliyun and Baidu Cloud also have competitive advantages in the video cloud market, which will not allow Tencent Cloud to easily gain market share.

Aliyun's biggest advantage in the video cloud market is its rich CDN resources. Aliyun officially launched the video cloud solution in April 2016. Since the establishment of CDN on Taobao in 2006, Aliyun has built nearly 3000 CDN nodes on six continents, and has accumulated rich CDN resources in the past 10 years. More importantly, Ali is good at using "banknote ability". After Ali Yun launched the CDN price war in 2015, its market share in the video cloud CDN field continues to rise.

The biggest advantage of Baidu Cloud in the field of video cloud is intelligence. In 2016, Baidu Cloud first put forward the trinity cloud computing strategy of "Cloud Computing + big data + artificial Intelligence". In terms of video cloud services, Baidu Cloud Intelligent Multimedia Cloud is based on infrastructure, relies on video big data, uses video artificial intelligence as the engine, and integrates ecologically and openly with Baidu's video content. help customers easily build intelligent multimedia applications, help customers improve production efficiency, enhance user stickiness and obtain user traffic.

In the face of the increasing pressure of competitors, on the one hand, Tencent Cloud continues to increase investment in related technology research and development, on the other hand, it also pays close attention to the development trends of various industries.

The popularity of the mobile live streaming industry around 2016 has enabled Tencent Cloud to successfully capture the opportunity to open the gap with its competitors.

The fierce battle in the clouds behind the spring tide of live broadcast

At the end of 2015, mobile live broadcast platforms such as Dragon Ball, Yingke and Zanthoxylum bungeanum were launched one after another, and began a fierce battle for traffic. By 2016, the emerging mobile live broadcast platform has directly staged a "thousand broadcast war" recorded in the history of the development of the Internet.

However, when the "Thousand broadcast War" was staged, most people did not realize that audio and video technology is the key technology of the live broadcast platform. For entrepreneurial teams, the threshold of this technology is very high. How on earth do these mobile live broadcast platforms, which are springing up like bamboo shoots after a spring rain, solve the problem of audio and video technology? The answer is video cloud.

2016 is also the year when cloud service providers such as Aliyun, Baidu Cloud and Jinshanyun officially launched video cloud solutions and cut into the video cloud market. It is no coincidence that the rise of mobile live streaming platforms is closely related to the popularity of the video cloud service market.

The important realistic foundation for the emergence of a "thousand broadcast war" is that the technical threshold is directly pulled down by video cloud service providers. Cloud service vendors provide a complete set of audio and video technology solutions to the LVB platform, so that the emerging LVB platform does not need professional audio client development, but only needs to recruit a few application development engineers to integrate SDK, and then make adjustments to quickly launch the LVB feature.

Therefore, with the hot development of the "thousand broadcast war", cloud service providers have also ushered in a wave of the best part of the development in the field of video cloud, and of course, there will inevitably be a fierce market confrontation. As a result of the confrontation, it is obvious that Tencent Cloud has become the biggest beneficiary, and 80% of the mobile live streaming platforms have become Tencent Cloud customers. The reason for this situation is not complicated.

First, Tencent Cloud began to launch video cloud services as early as 2014, earlier than other cloud service giants, and has accumulated more technical capabilities and service experience in the field of live broadcasting.

Second, Panview is in Tencent's traditional sphere of influence, and Tencent Cloud has more content ecological chips than other manufacturers.

In short, no matter which live broadcast platform becomes the ultimate winner after a "thousand broadcast war", as the largest video cloud solution provider, Tencent Cloud will not lose.

Unfortunately, the mobile live broadcast craze is cooling a little too fast.

Right or wrong, triumph or defeat, all is forgotten in the blink of an eye

The 2016 "thousand broadcast war" is fleeting. Since 2017, big waves have been sweeping the sand, short videos have become new favorites, and mobile live streaming has gradually declined. A large number of mobile live broadcasts were shut down in 2018, and users in the webcast industry continued to lose. By 2019, with the collapse of Panda Live, the pan-entertainment mobile live broadcast industry fell into silence.

In the process, Tencent Cloud's advantage in the video cloud market has also been diluted.

In particular, in 2019, Ali launched a trend of live e-commerce with goods, and Ali's advantage in the infrastructure market has been further established in the video cloud market. In 2019, Aliyun has a higher market share than Tencent Cloud in the CDN market of video cloud and the public cloud, private cloud and hybrid cloud infrastructure market.

Although Tencent Cloud still has a higher market share in the solution market than Aliyun in 2019, the solution market is much smaller than the infrastructure market. According to IDC, China's video cloud market reached $4.62 billion in 2019, of which the infrastructure market reached $3.94 billion, accounting for more than 85%, and the solution market was $680 million, accounting for less than 15%.

Generally speaking, in the basic disk of Tencent Cloud, Video Cloud, Tencent Cloud has gradually been pulled apart by Aliyun.

Hundreds of billions of video cloud markets are beckoning.

Aliyun has come from behind to catch up in the video cloud market. For Tencent Cloud, which has a first-mover advantage, it is indeed a shame to be overtaken by its opponents in its own basic market.

However, if Tencent Cloud can be brave after knowing the shame, it may not be able to reverse the defeat in the future. The fast-growing video cloud market is far from the time to establish the final pattern.

Since the epidemic at the beginning of the year, in addition to e-commerce live broadcast, online education, video conferencing and other application scenarios have emerged new market opportunities. Since the resumption of work, with the acceleration of 5G commercial, new opportunities in the video cloud market are also emerging. The large-scale popularity of 4K, 8K, 16K UHD video and VR/AR is inseparable from the technology of video cloud manufacturers.

In view of these video cloud application scenarios, cloud service manufacturers are actively exploring the market. Of course, the contest between Aliyun and Tencent Cloud is also extremely fierce.

After all, the broad market prospect of video cloud is too attractive, according to IDC's latest forecast, China's video cloud market will exceed $22 billion (about 154 billion yuan) by 2024.

More than 100 billion market is beckoning, cloud service manufacturers will certainly continue to increase investment in the field of video cloud. However, for Tencent Cloud, it also means that it will be more difficult to catch up with Aliyun.

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