Text | Chen Xuanbin
Source丨Intelligent Relativity (ID: aixdlun)
In 2020, live broadcast e-commerce will be completely "boiling."
On the one hand, whether it is the leading Taobao live broadcast, or the new Douyin, Kuaishou, and Xiaohongshu, they are increasing their investment in e-commerce live broadcast; on the other hand, big men, entrepreneurs, Internet celebrities, celebrities, etc. have also been clustered on the road of live broadcast, competing with each other for a while, and it is very lively.
All kinds of roles are nothing more than being divided into two. Taobao, the first to start live broadcast to bring goods, came from the e-commerce platform and integrated live broadcast with commerce early; while Douyin and Kuaishou were born out of the chicken feathers of the show live broadcast. Switched to a new field with goods.
But live broadcast is different from live broadcast. On the surface, it seems that a host speaks and shows in the live broadcast room. But the differences in technical details and experience are only known to those who have done live broadcasts. The devil is in the details. For example, if the delay is reduced by 1 second, the GMV can be pulled a few more points; if the storage cost of live content is lower by tens of thousands of yuan, there will be an additional playback function, so that consumers can watch when the anchor is resting. To the previous explanation...Recently, Taobao Live has moved out of the top scientists behind it and demonstrated the core technology that he has mastered.
In general, Taobao took 5 years to create the most suitable live broadcast environment for e-commerce, and the overall live broadcast technology is 3-5 years ahead of the industry. All these are the engineers and scientists of Taobao and Dharma Academy who have chosen the most difficult path and embarked on a technological no-man’s land.
What is supporting the tens of millions of live broadcast rooms of the super-big internet celebrity IPs such as Wei Ya and Li Jiaqi?
The popularity of live e-commerce does not seem to need to be repeated.
According to the data of iiMedia Consulting, the market size of live e-commerce reached 433.8 billion yuan in 2019, a year-on-year increase of 226%. At the same time, it is expected that the entire market will still double at a rate of 961 billion yuan in 2020.
Among them, Taobao Live has doubled its growth rate for 8 consecutive quarters, and the product opening rate and store access rate can reach 60%. This ultra-high conversion rate is the unique value created by Taobao Live and it also supports the entire live streaming business. The core of the model. But this conversion rate is supported by unique commercial and technical capabilities. This also allows the "Intelligent Theory of Relativity" to see behind a live broadcast, the technical challenges it faces are increasing.
Yes, the technical battle in the second half of the live broadcast has been started silently.
For a simple example, during the Double Eleven last year, Wei Ya and Li Jiaqi’s live broadcast directly exceeded 30 million people. To be precise, Wei Ya’s was 43.1536 million and Li Jiaqi’s was 36.835 million.
This means that every time Li Jiaqi yells "OMG, buy it, buy it" and the product goes online, tens of millions of people will snap up a product at the same time.
The technical difficulty of this, in the words of Liang Shu, the technical leader of the Taobao content social interaction team, is described as follows:
"In the past, we only encountered this problem at 0:00 on Double 11, but not now. Now with the rise of Taobao live broadcast, we will encounter this problem many times."
In many cases-that is to say, every "spike" of live e-commerce may be equivalent to the 0:00 purchase of the previous Double Eleven. From another perspective, Li Jiaqi kills one lipstick every second, which will be a technical extreme challenge for the chief scientist of Taobao Live.
Why is this happening? It is very simple. The live broadcast e-commerce is completely "boiled". The collision with the super influencer IP has brought tens of millions of traffic influx. Then the carrying capacity of the live broadcast room, the interactive gameplay of the live broadcast, etc. need to be given by scientists. More powerful technical support and empowerment.
Therefore, if the live broadcast e-commerce competition is the visible "fame" and the arena of Internet celebrities; then the private competition will be the invisible "technology", which is the home stadium of scientists.
Jump out of the "siphon phenomenon", this is a live broadcast of a technical secret battle
Since it is a private competition, it also means that this is a technical secret battle belonging to scientists.
Today, live broadcast e-commerce has long developed into an industry that competes over and under. On the bright side, it competes on the host’s IP personality, popularity, sales, topicality, fan appeal, etc.; secretly, it is the technical support of scientists, such as low latency, high concurrency, AI applications, codecs, and so on.
The former is high-key, the latter is low-key. Therefore, the public tends to pay more attention to the former, thus ignoring the importance of the latter.
Of course, this cannot be entirely blamed on the public. As a process of spreading influence, live broadcast often has "siphon phenomenon".
The so-called siphon phenomenon means that the more prominent individuals tend to have a strong attraction to the surrounding things, causing other things to move closer to them. In the live broadcast, due to the outstanding activity of individual anchors and the high focus of live broadcast footage, it is easy to over-enhance this phenomenon and blur the public's perception of the live broadcast industry.
When we jump out of the "siphon phenomenon" and focus on the back end of the live broadcast to re-examine the development of the industry, we will clearly see a group of scientists behind the scenes are setting off a technical dark war in the live broadcast market. There are three manifestations.
First, live broadcast e-commerce is moving towards a highly specialized technical road.
From Ali's point of view, this will be more obvious. Taobao live broadcast is no longer just the work of the Taobao platform, but has become the direction of the linkage development of the entire group. Among them, in terms of technology, there are applications provided by scientists from Alibaba Cloud and Dharma Academy.
For example, large-scale low-latency technology. The reason why Taobao can send the link to the mobile devices of consumers across the country at the same time after the anchor shouts "3,2,1, link", it relies on this technology.
And this technology is actually the result of the internal linkage of Alibaba Group. In this regard, Liang Shu introduced: "We have been studying low latency for the first two years and have been online for two years. This is what Taobao, Alibaba Cloud, Dingding and all the teams are doing. After going online, we (Taobao Live)’s freeze rate dropped by 55%, and the playback delay was less than 1s, down 72%."
What concept is this? The traditional playback delay is generally 5-7 seconds. The reason is that the live broadcast room itself requires real-time streaming, while the traditional playback delay will be cached in large quantities on the consumer side. Once the cache fails, there will be a freeze.
In order to solve this problem, Taobao uses Alibaba Cloud’s end-side technology and cloud technology to make the entire link between the consumer end, the anchor end and the cloud better, so that Taobao anchors can kill in real time and Taobao users can snap up purchase Pleasure.
So, purely from the perspective of live broadcast e-commerce, the technical optimization made by Ali scientists is undoubtedly a major guarantee for business fairness and live broadcast real-time. This unique gameplay of "3, 2, 1, up link" real-time spikes created by the technical support of scientists has also become a core competitive advantage of Taobao Live.
Here, we can better see that under the linkage of the group, live e-commerce is also moving towards a highly specialized technical road.
Second, in addition to the anchor, the scientists took over.
Although live broadcast e-commerce is hot, for the anchor, it is not half sea water and half flame.
Li Jiaqi once said in an interview that he dared not rest at all, "If you don't live broadcast today, maybe your fans will be attracted by the other 9,999 live broadcasts... ."
Some "grassroots" anchors have no professional team or the ability to develop a set of professional data development and analysis systems on their own, and they fall into a confused growth period.
It can be said that on the road of live e-commerce, each has its own troubles. Today, when technology is king, this is not without a way out. Scientists on Taobao platform are trying to explore a series of technical applications to assist anchors in solving their troubles.
For example, the attempt of a virtual anchor. As early as the 4G era, Dharma Academy established a multi-modal team. Through multi-modal intelligent integration, in the field of live broadcasting, Taobao scientists have developed virtual anchors to help live anchors explain products, interact with fans in real time, and so on.
At the same time, according to Dai Yan, the product leader of Taobao Live, the entire image of the virtual anchor will be more closely matched with the anchor's personalized demands in the future. In other words, Li Jiaqi's virtual anchor can be a show that closely resembles his style.
This eliminates the need to worry about the loss of fans due to personal departures for rest.
Another example is the launch of an intelligent assistant. Dai Yan said: "In the past few years, we will gradually find that as we continue to work on professionalism, our platform can quickly improve the core professionalism through today’s understanding of technology, understanding of data, and improvement of technology. ability."
It can be said that the current efforts of Taobao scientists are working to pave the way for this discovery. The intelligent assistant launched based on Alibaba's digital capacity building can perform product selection analysis, fan population analysis, and even "diagnosis" of each live broadcast screen to help Taobao anchors do a better job of "live broadcast".
Third, the anchor is in the front and the scientists are in the back, creating value together.
Once the division of labor is clear, the respective positions will be clear. AI technology assists the live broadcast of the anchor, which makes the cultivation of the anchor more professional, can concentrate on the live interaction with the front-end fans, and increase the conversion rate and sales.
Although the scientists behind the scenes are not so noticeable, their technical application is equally important for optimizing the live broadcast experience.
To give a simple example, Taobao is the only platform with playback functions among all live broadcast platforms. The latest achievement of Ali scientists in the field of video services is "Narrowband HD Technology".
This is a video service concept that harmonizes cost and experience. Narrowband HD technology reduces playback costs by dynamically adjusting the dimensions of the source definition, resolution, bit rate, frame rate, encoding algorithm, and playback strategy during video playback. And then realize the playback function of the live broadcast platform.
Obviously, having a playback function is, to some extent, a great guarantee for consumer rights. For the anchor, the playback function is a secondary transformation of the value of the live broadcast. According to Ling Xiao, the head of Taobao anchor Lin Shanshan's team, "(by the whole day) 15%-20% of our deals are through live playback."
From this point of view, the scientists who stand behind are focusing on user experience, anchor experience, and business experience through technical means, and are also creating surprising live broadcast value, which should not be underestimated.
It is true that the experience and optimization that the scientists' technology can bring is not an immediate result. Compared with the fast pace of the live broadcast rooms of the head anchors such as Wei Ya and Li Jiaqi, it seems a bit slow. However, it is undeniable that it is with the technical support of these scientists that the fast-paced live broadcast of the super internet celebrity IP and the influx of huge traffic can be perfectly supported.
Therefore, "Intelligent Relativity" believes that this will be an invisible technological battle, and the chief scientist is quietly breaking through the ceiling of the live broadcast industry's capacity and gameplay.
Those who do live broadcast have to figure out how to do the technology first
In fact, after Dong Mingzhu’s first live show was overturned due to network stalls, both Gree and the public may have a clearer understanding of the importance of the technology sector.
The logic is not difficult to understand.
Live e-commerce means the full digitization, networking and intelligence of the shopping guide scene, which is essentially an online consumer service. To complete such a service perfectly, what is needed is the collaboration of the anchor and the scientist.
To put it simply, to do a good job of live broadcasting, it is necessary to do a complete service chain before and after the live broadcast. Any simple service, if it is placed on an ultra-large-scale platform with 400 million users and hundreds of billions of GMVs like Taobao Live, cannot be completed by a single person, and it needs the technical support of scientists behind it.
Then, to get through the live broadcast service chain, we must first get through the technology chain.
The idea of Taobao live broadcast is not difficult to understand-ecological linkage, collaboration between scientists, to open up Ali’s internal technical chain, in order to output technical capabilities to the Taobao live broadcast platform to assist and empower anchors, platforms, and merchants to provide high-quality Live e-commerce service.
Once the service link is completed, a good live broadcast experience will bring solid and sustainable commercial value to the host, fans, brand owners, platform parties and other market players, and the value chain will be formed.
When the technology-service-value three chains are connected, the importance of the “technology” link at the starting point is self-evident. So, when we continue to think about it, what has supported the format of live e-commerce through today and into the future?
It's the anchor, and the chief scientist behind the anchor!
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