"Dividing food" LeTV: Can Internet TV go out of the subsidy era

For LeTV in September, it was supposed to be the most important month, but the results were particularly "low profile" and "dirty". With the big push in September, the pattern of Internet TV has also been rewritten.

For the home appliance industry, it is known as "golden nine silver ten." Since 2012, LeTV launched the “919 Music Fan Festival” for the first time, which has created a wave in the domestic color TV industry. Since then, “919” has been the promotional carnival festival in the Chinese color TV industry. As the launch of the e-commerce festival by LeTV, looking at the year's promotion cycle, it is second only to Ali's “Double 11” and Jingdong’s “618”, which is regarded as the third largest e-commerce shopping festival initiated by the company and affecting the entire industry. .


However, in September of this year, the big promotion of the color TV industry is no longer a protagonist.


Financial difficulties trigger a chain reaction


During the whole month of September, when all color TV companies played hot, LeTV gave almost no sound. The only thing outsiders can hear is that on September 12th, new LeTV announced the launch of the "919 Super TV Day" to replace the previous music fan festival "Buying members to send hardware".


At that time, LeTV CEO Liang Jun said that the “New 919” is an important step for the new LeTV to try to change. In the future, the new LeTV will be transformed into a new retail network with LePar. Without the substantial subsidy of “New LeTV” and “New 919”, there was no turmoil in the market after the release of the press release.


Analyst Analyst Zhu Dalin told me to understand the notes. The reason why LeTV is low-key this year is still a series of problems caused by financial difficulties. “Upstream suppliers all know that LeTV’s funding status is not credited to it, so it is out of stock to sell. ."


Another TV industry veteran told me to understand the notes. The shortage of funds caused a series of problems this year. For example, channel providers lost confidence in LeTV. Since the first half of the year, there have been a large number of channels to switch to other brands. In addition, lack of funds led LeTV.com to no longer purchase exclusive content and distribute self-produced programs. As a result, LeTV.com no longer has its own characteristics and has a greater impact on users. "The lack of LeTV video content has led to the loss of users." Zhu Dalin told me to understand the notes. (The following figure shows Analysys data shows that LeTV's active users continue to decline.)


At the same time, due to financial difficulties, LeTV did not engage in a high-level subsidy policy this year, did not do large-scale marketing, the attraction of the user's purchase naturally decreased.


Recalling last year's "919 Music E-Commerce Festival", LeTV made a grand live broadcast with Jiangsu Satellite TV. It invited a large number of stars to the scene and created a small record of selling 576,000 TV sets in 15 hours.


This year's 919, the new music as only a September 12 release, after no longer see the following. As for sales, some people in the industry told them to understand the notes. In September, LeTV’s online sales should be only about 50,000 units, and the offline situation is even less optimistic.


The funds led to a series of problems, no goods can be sold, there is no marketing, no ability to subsidize users, there is no good content to look at, suppliers wait and see, channels of business against the water, domino chain reaction caused LeTV as the situation is extremely optimistic.


According to previous common sense, holiday promotion LeTV must be the number one in the Internet brand TV, and it is far ahead, but this year will never return.


According to the sales volume of "919" this week, according to Avi Cloud's "AVC Color TV - Overall TV Online Retail Market Monitoring Weekly Data Report", the 39th week of 2017 (September 18 to September 24) In the case of LeTV, sales are no longer in the top ten, and sales are barely squeezed into the top ten. The situation can be described as a matter of fact.


In fact, LeTV's shipments have been falling since the beginning of this year. Understand the notes Through Sino Excelle's data, LeTV's sales from January to July accounted for less than 50% of the year-on-year decline; sales during the “618” e-commerce giant’s sales this year fell by 57% year-on-year. This year’s 919 should have been At home, but it is defeated.


Leshi abdicated, millet storm "snapping food" share


While LeTV is falling so dramatically, a huge market space has emerged. “LTV's funding problem has had a great impact. The original holiday has greatly promoted its sales to rank first, but now it has given millet and storms a certain gap to seize the market.” Zhu Dalin pointed out.


LeTV retires as the market space reserved for other manufacturers is undoubtedly an excellent opportunity. We reviewed the smartphone market. In 2015 and 2016, Samsung quickly fell in the high-end market in China. At that time, Xiaomi’s momentum was fierce. However, because there was no high-end product launch, it did not grab this cake.


Opportunity was left to Huawei. Because of the rapid growth in sales volume, Huawei's Mate series and P series were able to replace Samsung’s high-end products. Therefore, most of the high-end and commercial markets left by Samsung were captured by Huawei. This opportunity also established the continued explosive growth of Huawei handsets in the next two years.


LeTV has left a gap in the market. From the current data, millet and storm are all beneficiaries. According to the sales monitoring of the 39th week (October 18-September 24) of Ove Cloud Network, the top ten list has only two Internet brand TVs, one is Xiaomi and the other is Storm.


Millet TV just launched its highly competitive 4A series in the first half of the year. According to data from Yikang, the sales volume of the Xiaomi TV line in January-July 2017 rose by 91.2% year-on-year, and the increase was rapid. During the promotion period in September, Xiaomi TV sales were ranked first in several major platforms including Jingdong, Tmall, and Suning.


The increase in storm TV is also extremely evident. The Storm TV, which was announced in July 2015, is a new force in the Internet field. After the TV prices were raised in April this year, the storm still maintained very strong growth.


From the data analysis, during the "Fan Festival" activities lasting 33 days from September 6th to October 9th, the average daily sales orders were about 3636 units, and the total orders for online and offline channels reached 120,000 units. 220 million yuan. When Feng Xin was interviewed not long ago, Feng Xin had revealed to the reader that the total sales of Storm TV this year would exceed 1 million units. According to the fan festival data, the storm during the “Golden 9 Silver 10” period is undoubtedly an important player to grab music shares.


In fact, today's domestic Internet brand TV is experiencing a period of low tide, not only music, many brands of market "voice" are decreasing. Such as Cool TV, online sales decreased by 47.1% year-on-year; for example, last year's huge whale invested in marketing, this year's market action is also a lot smaller, in various promotional festivals figure is not active.


The above-mentioned industry insiders told me to understand the status quo of the notes. Xiaomi and Storm's television products are all Internet brands (also well-known Internet companies). When they extend this product category to TV, the brand's potential energy can continue. Other Internet TV brands are neither traditional TV brands nor well-known Internet brands. In the past two years, sales have completely relied on brand investment as a support, and a new brand was born. Judging from the laws of the market, this style of play is difficult to last long, so the industry feels that this year's Internet TV brands are ebbing.


The industry generally believes that this year's domestic Internet brand TV has reached a period of shuffling.


Millet TV was pressed for a few years by music, and 2017 finally ushered in the opportunity to stand up. Millet TV's style of play is relatively rampant this year, activities continue, and new products are very grounded gas, it can be said that in the Internet brand Yiqijuechen, swept away a few years ago as music brought to its haze.


Another force that cannot be ignored is Stormwind TV. As a new Internet brand, this year the storm has been strengthening the concept of artificial intelligence television, opened up a new track, and continue to strengthen their leading edge in this track. Liu Yiping, Storm TV CEO, said: "The reason why Storm TV can lead the industry-wide explosion of artificial intelligence TV is based on the accurate judgment of user needs. Based on remote voice and information flow storm artificial intelligence TV, to achieve a true sense The innovation of Internet TV experience during the festival, and the splendid sales data and high ratings of purchasers during the fan festival, are the best recognition and encouragement for our innovative efforts.Storm TV will continue to focus on artificial intelligence TV tracks, leading to China's large-screen Internet entertainment. Innovation."


New changes in Internet TV


The internal cause of change is not just the rise of the Internet TV market share, but a deeper change in the pattern.


First of all, Internet brand TV is moving out of the subsidy era. It can be said that LeTV is the creator of the Internet TV category, but at the same time it also created a new way of subsidizing (hardware free). In the past, LeTV’s promotion was based on member subsidies and hardware bundling. It was referred to as “double loss” in the industry: In the bundled pricing mode, both hardware and member businesses were losing money. LeTV's products are good, but the real reason for LeTV to achieve a very high market share in a short period of time is "double loss."


Under the leadership of LeTV, this category of Internet TV began to fall into a subsidy war. Industry insiders estimated that the average loss of a television in 2016 was only 800 yuan for a huge additional advertising investment. In 2016, the average loss of storm TV was only RMB 400 per vehicle. Millet TV loss situation is unknown, but understand notes understand Xiaomi TV's internal requirements for the millet is "no longer lose money in 2017", it is visible before the subsidy pricing.


With the gradual exit of LeTV, and with the gradual maturity of Internet TV companies, the drawbacks of subsidies have eased. Taking the storm as an example, after raising the price in early April this year, there was no impact on sales. The structure of products sold during the fan festival has also undergone great changes. The proportion of artificial television assistant products and large-screen products larger than 55 inches has increased significantly.


Xiaomi TV CEO Wang Chuan also put forward: “Millet TV pricing (based on the number of not lose money, how much the price.) It can be seen that this year's pricing of millet will no longer continue to lose money play.


Let's take this unconventional player and leave the market. The market is starting to be rational. Here is a vivid example: Canadian track and field athlete Johnson as a well-known 100-meter sprinter, repeatedly won the championship, repeatedly broke the record, others can not exceed. However, it was later discovered that a generation of kings actually took stimulants. After Johnson's withdrawal, the rankings on the track are the true rankings.


Today's Internet TV market also includes this meaning. The "double loss" style of music is not sustainable. The healthy development of self-blood production is valuable to the industry and users. Then the next year is the contest of the true strength of Internet TV. This year, Xiaomi and Storm have made their mark in the Internet brand. This is the beginning of a new pattern.


In addition, Internet TV has become the trend of the entire industry, and TVs now launched by traditional home appliance companies basically have Internet capabilities. Internet brands stirred up the market in the past few years, so that the entire television industry is accelerating the revolution. Today, the so-called traditional home appliance brands and Internet brands, two camps have gradually arrived at a track.


Undoubtedly, the next big players in the market will be technological innovation and operational capabilities. In terms of hardware innovation, traditional home appliances may have some advantages, but in some innovative technologies (such as artificial intelligence) and marketing capabilities, it is obviously an advantage area for Internet companies.


Taking artificial intelligence as an example, Storm considered AITV as "the largest family artificial intelligence assistant", reconstructed the relationship between television and people, and drastically changed the traditional form of "people seeking service" to achieve "value and service." Refactoring." Thanks to the differentiated experience created by focusing on artificial intelligence, as well as more than 6,000 offline channels across the country, and increasing brand awareness, the average passenger cost of Storm TV in the first half of 2017 dropped to around RMB 320, which is higher than 2016 average. 400 yuan dropped by about 20%.


Reconstructing the market with values ​​and services, we saw that the operation of the storm began to be benign: the average monthly income (ARPU) of stormy AI TV users increased from 50 yuan to 61 yuan. In addition, the storm AI TV users' operating rate is 65%, and the duration of use is 7 hours, which is significantly higher than the industry average of 44% of the operating rate and the average daily boot time of 5.1 hours (according to the data reported by Ovid Cloud AVC in August 2017. ).


In addition, the daily usage rate of the voice function of the storm AI TV is 65%, and it becomes a high-frequency use function for Storm TV users in just a few months after the release. Behind this small number, it means a sharp increase for users. Improve the opening efficiency of Internet services.


Conclusion


This year, the market generally agrees with the remarks of Internet TV shuffling. There are two main factors in resolving the notes: First, LeTV withdraws as a spoiler, and the market begins to return to rationality; second, the traditional household appliance brand and the Internet brand take the lead and begin a full range of new contests.


It can be said that this year's market reshuffle is not only the re-allocation of Internet brand television, but also the re-ranking of the entire television industry. Technological innovation and operational capabilities will be the winners and losers in the next phase of the TV market competition.


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