On the evening of March 28, LeTV Information Technology (Beijing) Co., Ltd. (LeTV) announced that its subsidiary New LeTV Smart Home Electronic Technology (Tianjin) Co., Ltd. (New LeTV Smart Home) and Shenzhen Tencent Computer Co., Ltd. System Co., Ltd. (Tencent) signed a three-year "Internet TV Cooperation Project Cooperation Agreement".
According to the announcement, based on the common goal of value creation, the two parties have reached a consensus on the proposed cooperation in the field of Internet smart TV, and provide video content services for the end users of the cooperative terminal products.
Specifically, New LeTV Smart Home and Tencent Video agreed to carry out content cooperation in the living room, and Tencent Video TV copyright content will be presented on LeTV TV. Divided into commercial revenue.
Tencent's investment in TV service providers is closely related to the company's layout of Tencent's video content. When talking about this cooperation, Tencent said, "Through the cooperation with New LeTV Smart Home, it will help Tencent Video to enrich third-party content distribution channels, further reach users and boost member and advertising revenue." In the future, the two parties will use their respective resources to bring more high-quality content copyright services to users.
In the video field, Tencent Video, iQiyi and Youku compete fiercely.
According to Tencent's financial report, as of the fourth quarter of last year, Tencent Video's mobile daily active accounts exceeded 137 million; as of February 2018, there were approximately 62.59 million subscribers. According to the updated SEC documents previously submitted by iQIYI, as of February 28, 2018, the scale of its paid members has reached 60.1 million. It can be seen that the competition of "Aiyou Teng" has become increasingly fierce.
In addition to the new Leshi Zhijia, Tencent has also invested in Skyworth's Coocaa TV, and has launched in-depth joint ventures with Falcon Technology, a subsidiary of TCL Group, in the field of home Internet. Similar to the development path of mobile payment and e-commerce, with online traffic and attention becoming more and more expensive and the market increasingly saturated, expanding to offline manufacturers is an inevitable choice.
For the new LeTV Smart Home, LeTV said in the announcement that this cooperation is in line with the company's ecological concept of "platform + terminal + content + application", and conforms to the company's content strategy of focusing on self-made and open content. This partnership further enriches the content portfolio offered by Super TV.
As early as the evening of November 26, 2017 , “LeTV Super TV” announced through WeChat that the main operating company of LeTV Super TV, “LeTV Zhixin”, was renamed “New LeTV Smart Home”. In terms of products, the brand name of LeTV Super TV will remain unchanged, and the brand logo will continue to use the original classic "letv" logo.
According to people familiar with the matter, the renaming of LeEco Zhixin to “New LeEco Smart Home” also means a shift in the positioning of the smart home. However, for LeEco, the current top priority is the sales of LeEco TVs, and the real implementation of the smart home strategy is something else.
Then dragged down by the overall development of LeTV, the development of the new LeTV Smart Home did not make a big difference. This can be seen from the downward revision of its valuation. On January 2 this year, LeTV announced that the new LeTV Smart Home plans to raise 3 billion yuan at a valuation of more than 12 billion yuan. However, on March 29, Xinleshi Zhijia plans to adjust to implement a capital increase plan based on a valuation of 9 billion. Within three months, the valuation plummeted by 3 billion.
In short, this is a good opportunity for the bumpy LeTV and the new LeTV Zhijia.