Discussion about this post

User's avatar
James Kim's avatar

Nice writeup. One thing I'd point out is that your piece never explicitly states that Alibaba and Tencent DOESN'T use Agora which is kind of confusing as initially your piece reads like they both do and had me conflating their live-streaming success with Agora's rise. I checked Agora's customer page and didn't see them there so I'm assuming they don't Agora, yet your thesis assumes Agora will win live streaming elsewhere. You highlight Agora's superior tech and scale as the reasons why it can win, but if anyone is to really succeed in live-streaming in the West, wouldn't it be Amazon? And isn't Amazon going to do all of this in house like Alibaba and Tencent? Think I'm with Lilian on this one. I see more fragmentation than winner-takes-all.

Curious if Lilian thinks the same way about Twilio? In my mind, mobile messaging/call center APIs will be in mind by all kinds of businesses, not just giant e-commerce platforms who can afford its own cloud computing data centers and to build video-streaming APIs.

Expand full comment
Fun Liang's avatar

Great piece! So why is Lillian long $API but Packy not?

Expand full comment
3 more comments...

No posts