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

As the live broadcast industry has come out of a period of expansion, 2018 has also become a year in which live broadcast network celebrities collapsed one by one.

In China, Chen Yifa, Li GE and others have been banned for touching the political red line. In the United States, pewdiepie, the "number one brother" on YouTube, is not at peace, frequently mentioning the issue of race in the live broadcast, and its fans attacked the Wall Street Journal's website in order to "ask for an explanation" after being bombarded by withdrew ads and media.

At a higher level of development, the impact of online celebrity anchors on the mainstream entertainment market this year is not a success. Although Feng Timo was on the stage with the mainstream artists, he was seriously reacted by Zhang Yixing's fans.

I do not know when, the image of online celebrity anchors from the grass-roots, entrepreneurial spokesman, suddenly become chaotic, low-level, uncontrollable.

However, the emergence of Vtuber may be another way of thinking in the dilemma of online celebrity anchors.

Behind the flop of online celebrities, customers, platforms and brokers complain incessantly.

Before we talk about Vtuber, we need to know exactly why we are broadcasting online celebrity flop.

In order to understand this problem, we specially interviewed a small partner in charge of placing ads in the live broadcast on a head live broadcast platform, and restored the problems that may arise in the commercial cooperation of live network celebrities.

When customers choose a certain online celebrity, the docking with online celebrity brokers has become a big problem. Due to the difference in work and rest time, it is very difficult to get in touch with Internet celebrities between 9: 00 a.m. and 3: 00 p.m. Many Internet celebrities are not used to the mode of booking business activities a month or two in advance, but prefer to take jobs temporarily according to their own economic situation. And in many cases, the agent of an online celebrity in a business activity picks up, and the online celebrity himself may change his mind a minute before the execution.

When it comes to implementation, online celebrities may also have all kinds of problems. For example, when he is late for broadcasting, he cries to the water friend how the computer cannot be opened for half an hour and completely forgets the oral product information; the so-called live broadcast script also does not exist, and it is impossible for online celebrities to remember the product information at all; for example, live broadcast plays games and ignores the details such as product presentation. What is even more exaggerated is that online celebrities walk away and scold each other directly during the live broadcast. Fans may be used to it, but in the eyes of some customers, it has become a "live accident".

On the whole, the main reason for the rapid collapse of live network celebrities is the excessive concentration of business values.

The birth of the live broadcast online celebrity industry was very embarrassing. At that time, the MCN organization represented by short video celebrities was not yet mature, and the traditional entertainment industry completely ignored it. Most live network celebrities grow up savagely by virtue of their game skills and personality charm, with guild support behind them, and often only primary anchors applaud secondary anchors.

So even if there is a brokerage team now, it will not be like the traditional entertainment industry, because the company has a lot of investment in training artists, so it has a strong control over artists. On the contrary, it is online celebrities who are often arbitrary in the brokerage team. After all, online celebrities themselves have always been the money maker.

At the same time, fan gifts generate much more revenue than business partnerships. Take pewdiepie, for example, the reason why he dares to run full of trains and lose his contract is because there are fans behind him to pay for the guarantee. On the contrary, the self-release is more popular among fans than being well-behaved, and the performance-to-price ratio of most business cooperation is not as good as that of super rockets whose fans even brush 2000 yuan each.

In short, neither the client nor the brokerage team can effectively contain online celebrities, and the extreme lack of internal competition makes online celebrities master extreme autonomy. Finally, it is difficult to control the status quo, piling up all the hidden dangers to the last pass-the platform, so that the "network ban" has become the only way to manage and control network celebrities.

Another idea of Vtuber: dehumanization of Internet Celebrity Industry

But another way of thinking has gradually emerged in the live online celebrity industry. Since it often creates a lot of uncertainty to regard online celebrities as money maker, how about symbolizing online celebrities and reducing their dependence on a certain person?

Vtuber, Japan's Internet buzzword of the year, is a similar concept.

Vtuber, or Virtual YouTuber, uses 3D capture technology for motion capture, converts real people into flexible 3D images in real time, and publishes videos or live broadcasts on YouTube. The virtual anchor Ai Jiang that we are all familiar with is a Vtuber. Of course, unlike the artificial intelligence in human design, the Vtuber is still controlled by real people.

In Japan, because of the good foundation of ACG culture, the concept of Vtuber is almost a success. Aisha accumulated 2 million subscriptions in a few months. During the same period, a large number of other IP flooded into the market, and Vtuber already has a professional brokerage company in Japan, which is responsible for the selection of live anchors and virtual image design. Many brands have also begun to choose Vtuber as an endorsement for business cooperation.

Recently, Taiwan has also begun to introduce the Vtuber industry, forming the Vtuber Alliance, which claims to make a debut of 100 Vtuber in 2019.

Compared with the traditional live network celebrities, what has the Vtuber model changed?

The first is the transfer of image ownership.

In the traditional online celebrity model, Chen Yifa is Chen Yifa. This personal image, which may be worth tens of millions of dollars, belongs to the anchor himself. But the virtual image operated by Vtuber is often a team work, which does not give the image actor the opportunity to "inflate" too much. Even if the actor makes mistakes in words and deeds, he or she can be replaced by someone else without the fans noticing. This strict internal competition mechanism will restrict the actors and control their behavior.

At the same time, there is the improvement of commercial security.

For live anchors, the efficiency of live broadcast is actually very low. Spend a lot of time sitting in front of the computer every day, once something can not be broadcast live, in addition to the loss of income, it is more likely to make the popularity decline. This also leads to the fact that online celebrity anchors often have no time for self-improvement, which is not conducive to the long-term development of the industry as a whole. However, the Vtuber mode can completely adopt the "shift system" of the controller, which can not only prolong the overall duration of live broadcasting, but also reduce the occurrence of situations such as failure of live broadcasting due to personal reasons of VJs and delay of business cooperation.

And the commercial extensibility of Vtuber avatars is stronger than that of real people.

Compared with real people, the commercial authorization of cartoon characters is obviously richer and more convenient. Including the existing ACG image of Vtuberization, is also a good business. Hellokitty, which we are very familiar with, opened its own channel in YouTube to attract more fans for IP.

At present, although China's Vtuber is not very popular, there is a similar trend in the field of Weibo online celebrities. Every time Weibo holds a V influence offline summit, there will always be some users wearing headgear or wearing headgear. These big V doors, which are both online and offline, are typical team operators' personal image and personal image can be transferred. We often hear of a big V "selling account", this kind of business value does not bind a certain everyone's model, but actually healthier.

Will the cheapness of collection equipment become a prairie fire in Vtuber?

But from the logic of the past, Vtuber is a high-cost industry. When it comes to real-life conversion of 3D images, we often think of the "rise of the Planet of the Apes" type of expensive human body capture technology. Compared with a live live broadcast that can be broadcast with a camera, the threshold of the device may stop a lot of people.

But what really invigorates Vtuber today is precisely the reduction in the cost of equipment.

From the field that we are most familiar with, the improvement of AI's real-time video processing capability has paved a bright road for the development of Vtuber.

In fact, the beauty function used by many live streaming software is no different from the face-changing function of converting people into 3D images from a technical point of view. As for limb and background processing, it is now very common in the field of short videos. When applied to live streaming, it only needs the improvement of computing power and the reduction of the model.

The progress of 3D structured light technology is also encouraging the development of Vtuber industry.

Take Apple's Animoji, for example, the 3D structured light technology of the iPhone X front-facing camera is perfect enough to restore human expressions. If the problem of image design and data flow transmission can be solved, it can be seamlessly connected to the live broadcast.

Last but not least, even if you do buy a set of human collection equipment for live broadcast, it will not be so expensive.

Take the device used by Taiwan's Vtuber Alliance as an example. Six HTC Vive positioning / controllers, plus a facial capture camera, cost a total of only 300000 yen, or less than 20000 yuan. Even an e-sports mainframe has basically reached this price.

Now that the firewood has been piled up, we are waiting for when the Vtuber fire will come to China.

Of course, from any point of view, Vtuber can not replace real-life online celebrity anchors, let alone because there are many serious diseases in the development of online celebrity anchors, we can use new technology to overthrow everything and start all over again.

However, as the introduction of a new model, Vtuber has a good chance to get rid of many disadvantages in the past and set up a more perfect last shift in the industry. At that time, I hope that those real-life anchors who have expanded in the past can learn from the virtues of people on paper.

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