The secret weapon behind NetEase’s social dream is becoming a pan-entertainment “black technology” factory

With the launch of three new social products, Toilet TV, Chatbao and Duoshan on the same day, the social track of "no grass grows under WeChat" is heating up again. Half a month before this, NetEase Cloud Music took advantage of the year-end summary to quietly get involved in the social field of "music interest matching", kicking off the 2019 "Social Year".

In fact, NetEase’s “social dream” has never been extinguished. More than four years before Chatbao joined hands with China Mobile, NetEase joined hands with China Telecom in August 2013 to launch the WeChat-standard YiChat. Xin, however, was born at the wrong time and was gradually "marginalized" under the powerful network effect of WeChat.

In November last year, NetEase also quietly launched a "acquaintance circle social product" - NetEase Circle, and will vigorously promote it starting this year. While new forces from all walks of life are eager to break out of the WeChat empire, NetEase, which has hundreds of millions of users and has never given up trying, is planning to accumulate more but gain less.

What's more, NetEase also has another secret weapon - NetEase Yunxin.

When Bullet SMS came out in August last year, Zhihu users keenly discovered that Bullet SMS is a "shell chat UI based on the magic modification of NetEase Yunxin SDK demo". Subsequently, NetEase Yunxin’s official Weibo posted a popular science article: Yunxin is a PaaS product that specializes in providing IM and audio and video. Kuauru Technology is only one of hundreds of thousands of corporate customers, and there is no plagiarism.

This "misunderstanding" that forced Luo Yonghao to come forward to clarify, also brought NetEase Cloud Letter into the public eye. Everyone discovered that the original bullet text message's "killer"-voice + text dual input is based on NetEase Cloud Not only that, NetEase Cloud Messenger also supports functions such as burning after reading, emoticons, pictures, videos, files, geographical location and other functions.

It is the realization of NetEase Yunxin's diversified functions and rich interactive forms that allow Luo Yonghao to quickly enter IM, a field where the threshold is not low. This year, Bullet SMS has been further upgraded to a chat treasure, with game-based gameplay such as money trees and gold coins being launched, as well as support for pan-entertainment gameplay.

Whether it is NetEase Cloud Music for music social networking, Duoshan for short video social networking, or ChatBao for gamified social networking, the new generation of social applications is far more than just instrumental IM, but incorporates more There are many pan-entertainment gameplays and deeper integration with entertainment scenes.

Pan-entertainment methods such as online doll hunting, werewolf killing, and live quizzes are actually part of the social life of the new generation of young people, and entertainment also pursues strong interaction and group participation.

NetEase Cloud Trust has also further expanded from the IM & audio and video PaaS platform when it was established more than three years ago to become a service provider that provides technology empowerment for pan-entertainment entrepreneurs.

According to NetEase Cloud CMO Jiang Hanyu, in 2018, Pan-entertainment customers accounted for 35% of NetEase Cloud customers, including various live broadcasts, short videos, werewolf killings, and doll-catching entertainment. Products also include new-generation niche social products such as Shiguang and Weekly CP.

With the continuous enhancement of the pan-entertainment attributes of the 95-00 generation, NetEase Yunxin’s business scale has also expanded rapidly.

In 2017, NetEase Cloud Trust’s business growth rate in the education industry exceeded 220%, its business growth rate in the culture and entertainment industry exceeded 260%, and its business growth rate in the social industry and enterprise services reached 260% respectively. % and 280%, more than 600,000 developers have accessed the platform.

The reason why NetEase Yunxin can seize the dividends of this round of pan-entertainment wave is inseparable from the accumulation and optimization of NetEase's own product technology on the one hand, and the continuous investment in new technologies on the other hand. explore.

Products such as NetEase Paopao and Yixin have provided NetEase Cloud Letter with solid IM technology accumulation. NetEase Cloud Music is exploring entertainment such as short videos, live broadcasts, games, etc. NetEase Cloud Trust not only provides technical support, but also can explore and innovate in pan-entertainment and verify technology based on hundreds of millions of users, and then empower entrepreneurs. Get twice the result with half the effort.

In addition, NetEase Cloud Trust has also made adaptive adjustments to its technical architecture, such as improving the stability and ease-of-use of the IM cloud platform’s technical architecture to address technical difficulties and application scenarios of IM and real-time audio and video. and security.

Not only that, NetEase Cloud Trust also continues to conduct "point-to-point" technology optimization for segmented industries and market segments. When servicing music teaching online sparring products, it is optimized for areas with weak network connections in third- and fourth-tier cities. When servicing online English courses, it is optimized for overseas audio and video calls.

"With the help of the power of our technology, combined with user preferences, we use technical means to iterate more and more fun gameplay, and extract product differences. Only in this way can we turn traffic into users." Jiang Hanyu Mentioned why NetEase Yunxin attaches so much importance to technological exploration.

When the traffic dividend of the mobile Internet is drying up, start-up companies are collectively saying goodbye to traffic thinking and paying more attention to user retention and product differentiation. NetEase Yunxin can provide them with solid technical support.

At the MCtalk Summit not long ago, Jiang Hanyu specially introduced two "AI black technologies" that NetEase Yunxin has practiced with great concentration: "super-resolution" technology that can improve the resolution of the original image, and technology that can mark targets. AI video recognition.

"Super resolution" technology is not unique to NetEase Cloud. This "black technology" can instantly increase the resolution of low-pixel images. NetEase Cloud's innovation lies in its further application of super resolution technology. to the field of video.

Due to the dynamic nature of the number of video frames, the difficulty of over-scoring a video is much higher than that of a picture. Jiang Hanyu made an analogy: If the difficulty of over-scoring a picture is to climb a 1,000-meter mountain, then the difficulty of over-scoring a video is We have to climb a 5,000-meter mountain.

The reason why video super-resolution has become a reality is because of the relatively common convolutional neural algorithm. After several years of development, the convolutional neural algorithm has moved from conceptual hype and general capabilities to the stage of deep scene application. NetEase Cloud uses artificial intelligence deep learning to reconstruct low-resolution videos into high-resolution videos, making blurred images and videos instantly high-definition.

This means that applications such as short video calls and mobile live broadcasts can obtain better experiences in advance before the arrival of the 5G era, and will further accelerate the arrival of the short video social era.

The AI ??video recognition technology developed by NetEase Cloud Trust and NetEase AI platform technology can mark character information, identify simple actions, and classify virtual characters in video streams with a relatively high accuracy, which makes advertising planting possible. There is new room for imagination for entry, personalized recommendations, intelligent search, fixed-point playback, etc.

"We will train technical modules based on our user scenarios. Products and technologies should complement each other." Jiang Hanyu said. As the technology iteration in the pan-entertainment field becomes faster and faster, the snowball of "technology-scenario" mutual driving will also roll faster and faster.

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