Recently, Apple, LeTV, Ali and other companies have been reported to bid for VIZIO, the largest smart TV manufacturer in the United States. Although LeTV has issued an announcement, the industry believes that as TV becomes an Internet terminal, Internet TV will be smart. Mobile phones have become the target of Internet companies trying to subvert.

The data shows that in the first half of this year, the retail share of Chinese Internet TV brands in the TV market was 16%, an increase of 7.9 percentage points compared with last year. The leapfrogging era of the large-screen family living room Internet is coming. However, what is embarrassing is that when the industry giants attacked the city and expressed optimism about the prospects of the industry, a proposition that is crucial to the company is still in front of these Internet TV companies – how to make money?

When Internet TV has increasingly entered the user's family and become an increasingly hot Internet terminal, the reporter recently conducted an interview investigation on this industry, with a view to more comprehensively reflecting the current development status and problems faced by the industry.

At present, the Internet TV ecosystem presents three powerful models. One is the LeTV model, one is the model of traditional home appliance enterprises such as Hisense and Skyworth, and the other is the super-dimensional ecological model of Oriental Pearl and Zhaochi. In an interview with reporters, China's home appliance industry analyst Wen Wei said that the Internet commercials that are now rushing into the Internet have not changed as much as the CRT TV era. In the next two years, they will experience a market competition situation of one enemy and ten. In the end, there are only a handful of brands left by shuffling.

Internet TV cabbage price

At present, the price of a 40-inch Internet TV has already fallen below the price of a mid-range smartphone.

The reporter learned from Gome, Jingdong Mall and other online and offline channels, the price of the 43-inch 4K popular color TV is only 1899 yuan, the same size 4K to see the color TV is only for 1999 yuan, and the new millet 3S TV as low as 1799 yuan. A shopping guide told the Daily Economic News reporter that many TVs in the 43-inch to 49-inch range are priced at less than 2,000 yuan. Young people buy more because these TVs are cheaper than smartphones, and some give members a member experience. Service, "very good value for consumers."

The reporter learned that the average price of the same 65-inch 4K curved TV on the market is about 20,000 yuan, and the price of the same size TV of Xiaomi has already been smashed, and the price is as low as 8,999 yuan. In addition, Micro Whale TV and Tmall have jointly launched a flagship-grade 55-inch TV, priced at only 4,198 yuan (with a 12-month content package), LeTV's 55-inch ultra 4X55 TV is priced at 3,599 yuan, popular Super-dimensional TV 65-inch G65Y starting package price of 3,999 yuan.

Looking back on the development of Internet TV brands in recent years, the low-price strategy can only be regarded as the first step in siege. Nowadays, Internet TV brands have already got rid of the brutal and extensive bidding and directly entered the “free” era.

The first to play the "buy members to send hardware" model is LeTV, which successfully enabled LeTV's TV business to create a sales peak of 467,000 units of Super TV and a total sales revenue of 1.015 billion yuan. Subsequently, major Internet companies competed to join the war.

Liu Yaoping, CEO of Storm TV, said, "40X Wars Edition 40-inch TV is less than 1,000 yuan, and the hardware can be sent free of charge as the user value continues to increase." The shopping guide told reporters that some consumers are still not familiar with Internet TV. The state, but through the comparison of the store, is really visible and tangible, this model is cost-effective and naturally acceptable.

Add more than 10 brands a year

According to the survey of the 2015 China Internet TV Development Blue Book, the living room economy has been revitalized and energized with the help of the development of Internet TV.

Under this important opportunity period, more new brands are added to it. According to incomplete statistics, Internet TV brands have increased by more than 10 in 2015, and the total number of Internet TV brands has been equal to that of traditional TV brands, with nearly 20 companies.

Most of the new brands are born with the "Golden Key". In July last year, Suning’s video website PPTV’s smart TV debuted; in the same month, Stormwind announced that it would establish a joint venture with Japan Rishun, Aofei Animation and Sannuo Digital Video, and also to enter Internet TV; in August, media tycoon, Chinese culture The fund's helm, Li Ruigang, released “Micro-Whale TV” and obtained the shares of Ali and Tencent. In October, Fengxing.com joined forces with Oriental Pearl, Zhaochi, Haier and Gome to announce that it will enter the Internet TV industry through equity bundling.

Recently, in the hit "China New Songs", careful netizens found that in the second episode, the light box logo of the Whale TV and some TV screens were erased.

According to industry analysts, whether it is from the exposure rate or the discussion of netizens, the performance of the micro-whales has greatly robbed the limelight of the main champions, and the title of the famous brand name of 400 million yuan bears the important mission of improving the brand value. Can not be expected due to the high exposure of the micro whale.

As a young brand, the micro-whales boldly bet the phenomenon-level IP "China's New Songs", which undoubtedly made a fire for the competition of Internet TV brands in 2016.

Obviously, with the addition of new brands, the competition for Internet TV will be even more fierce in 2016. As Stormwind Feng Xin said, the competition for Internet TV brands has just begun.

Content is hard for the king to make money

From the perspective of the current domestic Internet TV industry, there are two models that have been widely recognized in the market. One is the traditional appliance model represented by Hisense, TCL, Skyworth, etc., which only produces hardware and does not produce content. The second is Music is regarded as a representative, covering everything from hardware to content to after-sales.

The third popular TV that wants to challenge the first two models is building its super-dimensional ecological model, which bundles five leading companies with an original two-tier equity structure. In addition to popular, Zhaochi is responsible for hardware, Oriental Pearl is responsible for the content, Gome, Haier is responsible for the way the store sells.

But no matter which mode, these Internet TV companies have the problem of making money. The typical Xiaomi and LeTV Internet TVs are all loss-making on the hardware, and the content has not seen the dawn of profit for the time being. At present, the company is currently issuing additional shares of the company, although the price of the increase is set at 12 yuan or earlier, but as of July 24, the stock price is only more than 8 yuan, which also shows that the capital market is not optimistic about its dominant popular TV.

In fact, fierce competition also stems from the saturation of the market. According to data from Avi Cloud (AVC), in 2015, global color TV shipments reached 230 million units, down 2.5% year-on-year. China has become a major region for the production and sales of color TVs in the world, and the growth rate has slowed down. In 2015, the retail volume of China's color TV market was 46.74 million units, an increase of 4.8% year-on-year. The retail sales volume was 157.2 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 7.5%.

In addition, experts predict that from 2016 onwards, the future market will enter a long-term stock market competition. Therefore, the low-cost strategy of Internet TV makes the competition in the TV market without increments even more fierce. The original pattern will inevitably be broken and reshuffled. .

Wen Wei believes that the above three Internet TV models have their advantages and disadvantages, but they will become smaller and smaller as the industry advances. The current mode of Internet TV, simply one is to jointly create an ecosystem, and the other is a self-created ecosystem. The mode of cooperation between traditional TV companies and Internet companies is the so-called "+ Internet", which is the only way to get what is needed.

Traditional enterprises embrace the Internet to gain more than just the content of connected Internet and value-added services, but a new TV ecosystem. In April of this year, Hisense and Huada TV, ICNTV, iQiyi, Tencent video reached a strategic cooperation, Skyworth, Konka are also doing similar cooperation, Konka has also deeply integrated Tencent video rich video resources, games, music, It makes Konka capable of providing content and value-added services.

In Wen Yan's view, the Internet brands such as Xiaomi and LeTV, which were born under the Internet genes, have an advantage in brand marketing that traditional TV brands cannot match. However, the domestic traditional TV brand headed by Hisense, TCL and Skyworth is still the first camp. The advantage of technology and brand is that the former cannot be surpassed in the short term. These advantages are more prominent in the international markets such as Europe and the United States.

According to data from Avi Cloud (AVC), the market share of domestic traditional brands in the first half of 2016 was 75%, and each brand share was relatively uniform.

Wen Wei believes that with the stability of the domestic video website structure, the end of the Internet TV license party alliance will end, the content supply will tend to be homogenized within two or three years, and the competition gap between new and old brand content will be shortened. In other words, the content is king is only the first stage of the Internet brand TV brand to seize the market.

“After all, unlike the smartphone market, the frequency of TV update is low, the dividend period is not obvious, and although the Chinese color TV market has risen, it has become saturated. There are more than 20 content-based Internet brands in the stock market. It is the mission of all brands to compete together and seize the incremental market.” Wen Wei believes that low-cost Internet TV brands are plunging the Chinese color TV market into an embarrassing situation of “incremental increase without income”, and with brands with core technologies. In contrast, these Internet TV brands lack the foundation of accumulation.

Dong Min, general manager of Avi Cloud (AVC) Intelligent Display and Digital Entertainment Group, revealed that in March of this year, Aowei Cloud and Tencent made a survey on the factors that consumers consider when purchasing TV. The results show that up to 36% of consumers are concerned about the trend; 21% of consumers are concerned about the appearance; only 19% of consumers are concerned about the price. When consumers enter the store to purchase, 73% of consumers plan to spend 2,000 to 9,000 yuan. Among them, the range of 5000 to 7000 yuan is mostly.