Chinanews Client Beijing, October 14 (Peng Jingru) Will "bean sprouts", "tiger fish" or "tiger sharks" appear in the live broadcast industry?
The answer is coming.
Recently, the game live broadcast platform Huya and Douyu official announcement merged, and netizens "finally don't have to worry about which live broadcast platform to open when eating takeout."
The most gratifying one should be Tencent, after all, the two bear children will not be struggling for the time being.
"Fish and Tiger Fighting" in the live broadcast industry, Penguin has the last laugh
On the evening of October 12, Douyu and Huya both issued an announcement stating that Huya would acquire all the issued shares of Douyu through a share swap.
The existing shareholders of Douyu and Huya will each hold 50% of the economic interest in the combined company.
According to the merger agreement, if the merger is completed, Huya’s current CEO Dong Rongjie and Douyu’s current CEO Chen Shaojie will become co-CEOs of the combined company, and Chen Shaojie will also become the tenth member of Huya’s board of directors.
Data map: E-Sports Hall.
Photo by Zhang Bin
Prior to this, Douyu and Huya could be described as needle-point to wheat-mang, and no one would let anyone.
From 2018 to 2019, Douyu complained to Huya 23 times in succession on the grounds of infringement of intellectual property rights, and asked Apple to remove two live streaming apps under Huya.
This incident finally came to an end with a "stop complaint" ruling issued by the People's Court of Nansha District, Guangzhou City, Guangdong Province.
The "black public relations incident" that occurred in 2018 was also a manifestation of the intensity of the conflict between the two sides. At that time, Douyu publicly released a research report called "Internet "Black Public Relations" on the official WeChat account" and published the "Black Public Relations" on the WeChat public platform. "Public Relations SAYNO" and other articles, accusing Huya of chasing shadows, wantonly smearing Douyu and its platform anchor.
In July 2020, the Nansha Court in Guangzhou issued a second-instance verdict in this regard, and believed that fighting fish constituted commercial defamation and should apologize to the plaintiff Huya.
However, Douyu did not fulfill the judgment for a long time, until September was listed as a person to be executed by the Nansha District People's Court of Guangzhou City and publicly apologized.
On September 21, 2020, after Douyu issued a statement of apology, he was teased by netizens, "Apologize for the article in 2018? Just say that you want to merge, without laying the groundwork." "The young couple quarreled at the end of the bed."
It is worth noting that Douyu and Tencent also signed a "reorganization agreement" on October 12, Tencent will transfer the "Penguin E-sports" game live broadcast business to Douyu, Douyu and Penguin for a total price of US$500 million. After the merger of e-sports, the whole is merged with Huya.
After the merger is completed, Douyu will become a private wholly-owned subsidiary of Huya and will be delisted.
The merger is expected to be completed in the first half of 2021. Through the acquisition of shares of all parties, Tencent will become the largest shareholder of the new company after the merger, with 67.5% of the voting rights.
"The fish swallowed the penguin, the tiger swallowed the fish, but the biggest winner is the penguin." Some netizens commented this way.
The fish and the tiger shook hands, hurting the anchor?
Tencent may have been a headache for a long time in the struggle between Huya and Douyu. After all, it holds 36.9% and 38% of the shares of the two respectively. It can be said that the palms and backs of the hands are all meat.
In March 2019, Tencent’s IEG (Tencent Interactive Entertainment Group) even established a new department-the game live broadcast business department. One of the main tasks is to coordinate the three e-sports of Douyu, Huya, and Penguin, with the intention of balancing the three inter-mining anchors. Compete and control overall consumption.
Fighting between fish and tiger, the anchor once sat to reap the "fisherman's profit".
After Douyu received $20 million in Series A financing from Sequoia Capital in 2014, it has successively digged out anchors from Huya at high prices.
"Betta TV dug 6 people from Huya live broadcast in a month, with a total cost of more than 60 million" reports were overwhelming, including the top LOL anchor Xiaozhi at the time, and the signing fee was reported to be as high as 15 million.
From 2014 to 2015, the value of game anchors has generally increased by more than 10 times. Platforms such as National Live Broadcast and Panda TV have successively participated in the battle, which has allowed the head anchors to start frequent job-hopping modes, and frequently refresh the upper limit of the signing bonus.
Data map: A female e-sports anchor.
Photo by Zhang Bin
However, this situation of unfair competition was gradually stopped by the judicial circle.
In April 2020, the Guangdong Higher People's Court issued the "Guidelines for Trial of Civil Disputes Concerning Intellectual Property Rights in Online Games (Trial)", which clarified the boundaries between anchors' breach of contract and unfair competition on platforms.
In addition, the judgment of high compensation for breach of contract and the judicial opinions of the judicial community have also made the competition between anchors between platforms increasingly rational.
For example, the game anchor Hi (formerly known as "Jiang Haitao") changed to Douyu in 2017 when the contract with Huya had not expired. In February 2018, the court ordered Hi's to compensate 49 million yuan in liquidated damages.
And Wei Shen (formerly known as "Wei Zhen"), a well-known e-sports player who originally belonged to Douyu, jumped to Huya when he had a live broadcast contract in 2017, and eventually had to pay a penalty of 85.22 million yuan to Douyu.
In the opinion of some anchors, this time the fish and tiger shake hands, there will be less and less unfair competition between the major platforms to dig out people to increase the anchor's worth. The sky-high contracting fees for anchors may become history, and the top anchors may face a salary cut.
The staff of a certain head guild of Douyu said that after the merger of the two platforms, the competition will become smaller and will not dig each other as before. The most affected should be the head anchors like Zhang Daxian and Xu Xu.
"It used to be 10 million per year, but it may drop to 8 million per year or even 6 million per year."
However, Zhang Yongjun, a professor at the School of Journalism and Communication of Central China Normal University and director of the Research Center for Media Ethics and Media Management, believes that the merger of Huya and Douyu is the result of market competition. This is a market choice of 1+1>2, and the platform has the right to speak after the merger. Will be further strengthened.
The head anchor is recognized by users and will have a better development.
The competition faced by ordinary anchors will be more intense.
Can the merger produce a "King Explosion"?
The host is not the only one facing fierce competition. On the live game track, all parties are eyeing each other.
According to iResearch's "China Game Live Broadcast Industry Research Report 2020", since 2019, no new independent game live broadcast platform has been established, indicating that the game live broadcast industry has gradually become saturated.
However, as an important content industry track, game live broadcast still has strong appeal and new opportunities.
On the one hand, cutting-edge players such as Bilibili, Kuaishou, and Watermelon Video expand their game live broadcast business and continue to increase their investment; on the other hand, many entertainment live broadcast platforms such as Kugou Live, Now Live, and iQiyi have extended game live content. , To build a diversified live broadcast content ecology, the competition in the second half of the game live broadcast is still very fierce.
Data map: Employees praise their company's online celebrity live broadcast.
Photo by Wei Liang
Xiaohulu big data shows that Kuaishou’s data in the dimensions of active anchors, gift income, and number of gifts has reached the sum of Douyu and Huya.
In April 2020, the number of broadcasts of Kuaishou game anchors reached more than 1.8 million, while Douyu Huya was 650,000 and 830,000 respectively. Kuaishou anchors’ gift income totaled 1.9 billion yuan, and Douyu Huya was 700 million yuan and 800 million yuan respectively.
Station B began to invest heavily. Not only did it spend 800 million yuan to win the exclusive domestic broadcast rights of the "League of Legends" global finals in China for three years, it also signed the former "Betta fish sister" Feng Timo for 50 million yuan. Uzi, a well-known League of Legends e-sports player, also settled in Station B.
If Kuaishou and Station B are both Tencent's invested companies, which can barely be regarded as friendly forces, the investment of Bytedance in the game makes Tencent more vigilant.
Beginning in the second half of 2019, in addition to light casual games, ByteDance began to experiment with the development of heavy games, and tried live broadcast of DOTA games on Douyin.
In 2020, some games such as "Hot Blood Street Basket" and "One Piece Hot Blood Route" in the category of ByteDance game agents have surfaced.
Not only are there wolves in front, but also tigers behind, the game live track itself is also facing series of problems.
Douyu and Huya's financial report for the second quarter of 2020 show that the realisation of live games has entered a bottleneck period from rapid development.
On the one hand, the two users are highly overlapped, on the other hand, the revenue growth rate continues to slow down and the revenue structure is too single.
Huya's total paying users in the second quarter of 2020 were 6.2 million, an increase of only 100,000 over the first quarter; the year-on-year growth rate in the first quarter of 2019 was 93.4%, but it was only 34.2% in the second quarter of 2020.
Douyu's average paying user accounts in the second quarter was 7.6 million, the same as the first quarter.
Except for members paying in live broadcasts, advertising is almost the only other source of profit.
IResearch believes that in the face of a single revenue structure, the live broadcast platform continues to explore and innovate and develop new business models such as accompany play, live broadcast e-commerce, and cloud gaming.
"It can be seen that in addition to the original game and event live broadcast content, the top game live broadcast platform continues to expand into diversified content forms such as entertainment, show venues, homemade events, and homemade variety shows."
At the moment when everything can be broadcast live, whether Huya and Douyu can work together to win the game live broadcast battle is not yet known.
(Finish)