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.
Super Informative. Question - are there LiveStreamed E-commerce "shows" here in the US? I'd like to watch/participate/transact. Who are the content producers? I would expect this to have greater potential with young audiences?
Interesting (not boring?) and not surprising the fact that livestreaming is such a big piece of the ecommerce puzzle in China. The way you lay it down reminds me of how infomercials and QVC worked. And that's exactly the reason I don't think Livestream E-commerce won't reach mass appeal in the US. TV infomercials are/were aired late-night. QVC is for old people. If it manages to make a big hit, I expect it to be on older populations. Infomercials, for now, are not sexy.
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.
Great piece! So why is Lillian long $API but Packy not?
Great article, love they deconstructing of the different players.
Super Informative. Question - are there LiveStreamed E-commerce "shows" here in the US? I'd like to watch/participate/transact. Who are the content producers? I would expect this to have greater potential with young audiences?
Interesting (not boring?) and not surprising the fact that livestreaming is such a big piece of the ecommerce puzzle in China. The way you lay it down reminds me of how infomercials and QVC worked. And that's exactly the reason I don't think Livestream E-commerce won't reach mass appeal in the US. TV infomercials are/were aired late-night. QVC is for old people. If it manages to make a big hit, I expect it to be on older populations. Infomercials, for now, are not sexy.