CC talk VP Lu Jian explains the prospect of the live streaming industry in China, and why monetisation is a concern
During the Slush Shanghai event on October 31st, we had the pleasure of speaking to Lu Jian, Vice President of CC talk, the live streaming arm of online education platform Hujiang.com. This August, Lu Jian joined Hujiang.com from 360’s live streaming platform. This job move was seen as a solid confirmation that this would be another company prioritising live courses.
“Within a year, more than half of the live streaming sites today will cease to exist, simply because none of them — not Inke, not Huajiao — have a successful business model,” Lu Jian tells us.
Live streaming platforms have voracious appetites for cash, with most of the expenses coming from broadband costs, which could come down to as much as RMB10 million (US$1.4 million) a month. But the trickle of revenue from these companies consists solely of the cut taken from“offerings” made to the KOLs, which come by a dime a dozen nowadays. Nevertheless, an exclusive contract with one of any degree of fame still leaves these platforms millions of RMB poorer.
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In stark contradiction with all the ways these platforms are burning cash, the content they are producing doesn’t create much value. “One interesting trend is that once some of these platforms attract a large volume of viewers, they begin to seek ways to fuse live streaming with e-commerce,” says Lu Jian.
He believes that with the return to rationality, those that lack a feasible business model will have trouble finding capital when it’s time to raise the next round, and many of these will be washed ashore after the frenzy calms.
Lu purports that the opportunities are still there are mainly for live streaming verticals, and he predicts that there is ample room for imagination in medicine and health care, and of course, education. “These fields satisfy rigid demand,” he believes.
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“Jiangsu’s course live streaming platform CC talk was founded as early as 2012. Once a tool available only to paid subscribers. Now, it’s fully open to all and if there’s something you want to teach and share, you can live stream your own class.” Developers at CC talk are working to introduce other teaching tools such as slides, quizzes, and hand-raising mechanisms to live streaming, to reconstruct as much as possible, a physical classroom.
“Most importantly, our courses have value to to our customers, and they are willing to pay for the content. We have a distinctly profitable model,” Lu proudly emphasised to Technode. He is also proud of the free public welfare courses CC talk is providing to rural schools, allowing students with little access to good teachers, audit classes in better school online.
“Live streaming is one way to bridge the inequality gap in education,” he says, referring to the huge deficit in qualified teachers in China’s backwaters and rural areas.
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The article Online Education Live Streaming Says Half The Industry To Breathe Their Last Within One Year first appeared on Technode.
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