introduction
A few years ago, smart TV was still a new category of television. However, with the continuous marketing and product updates of major manufacturers in recent years and the popularization of smartphones, smart TVs have now become completely new channels for consumers in newly purchased TVs Inevitable choice, just as now buy a cell phone will buy the same natural as a smart phone.
In the smart phone market, the mainstream smart phone brand is no longer the overlord of Nokia, Motorola, Ericsson, etc. In the same year, the four domestic brands of 'China Cool Union' were not only Huawei but also the others Instead they are OPPO, VIVO and Internet brands such as Xiaomi, Onega, Hammer and Meizu.
So smart TV market, like the smart phone market, will be replaced by the emerging Internet brand of traditional TV brands, occupy the new smart TV market?
status quo
Let's take a look at the total sales of Smart TVs for this year's Double XI. According to Orville's report, on October 11, 2017, total sales of smart TVs were 2.057 million units, up 21.7% from the same period of last year.
Prices, the second half of the panel prices fell, the price of each size compared to 616/818 also declined, reached the lowest point of this year.
The following figure data from Orville cloud detection online sales of various smart TV data
As you can see, millet and storm are the only two Internet TV brands among the top ten online sales.
To help Xiaomi hit the top of the first four main models, the first is ¥ 949 32 inch small size TV, followed by ¥ 2549 millet 4A 55 inch TV, in addition to the 1080P 43 and 49 two size TV. The largest storm sales models are small 32-inch models.
It can be seen that the main users of Internet brand TV are still more concentrated in the small room, the price-sensitive young buyers.
Internet brand TV
Friends who are familiar with LeTV may find that LeTV, which once won the monthly sales champion for some size models a few years ago, did not appear on this list.
Looking back 4 years ago, in 2013, after the launch of the first TV super-X60 and S40, the first TV program of LeTV, with the help of breaking the industry's low price, rich content, new Internet image and new membership fee, Internet Hardware Promotion Way, after the release became the 40/60 size segment sales champion, unlimited scenery.
In the following few years, with the rapid expansion of LeTV's full range of products and the establishment of its brand, LeTV's sales volume in 2016 reached a peak of 6 million units, making LeTV just 5 years after it was launched, 5,000 in China Tens of thousands of color TV market has become a can not be ignored TV brand.
At the beginning of February, at the Spring TV Story conference of LeTV, Liang Jun, the lead CEO of LeTV, set a goal for LeTV to secure 7 million for 8 million in 2017. Even this year 414 LeTV Business as LeTV Sales dropped sharply, LeTV TV also reached 386,000 sales.
However, a series of changes and crises that took place inside LeTV at the end of last year have caused a serious blow to LeTV as the volume of sales plummeted and there was very little volume after the last wave of sales in 414. What is more news was that the total sales of LeTV in September Tens of thousands of districts.
Earlier this year, Liang Jun, who put forward the rhetorical target, also recently broke out with Sun Hongbin and is preparing to resign during the recuperation period, and it is a matter of regret that LeTV, the first banner of this Internet TV, is now lonely.
At the beginning of 2017, many Internet-branded TVs predicted the difficulties of this year's music industry, and they all hoped to take advantage of the decline in music sales to occupy LeTV's market share. For the moment, the best performing is millet television.
Xiaomi TV and Xiaomi Mobile are their own operations within Xiaomi, rather than operating indirectly through eco-chain companies. From this point of view, Lei Jun hopes to occupy the ambitions of home entertainment and smart centers through large-screen TVs.
Millet TV also follow the millet has always been a high cost, voice and artificial intelligence sense of technology in several small and medium-sized TV to adopt a very attractive pricing strategy.And millet television can take advantage of the continuity of the millet brand Force, and is gradually spreading Xiaomi offline sales channels, so this year has achieved good results.
Sales of other Internet-branded TVs such as Micro-whales, Storm, PPTV, Trendy and others will also grow this year.
So from the flat-panel TV market as a whole, the Internet brand TV is gradually replacing the traditional TV, continue to be the same as the smart phone market, expanding the share of the Internet brand in the smart TV market? Let us look at the first half of this year Ovio cloud statistics .
As can be seen from this chart, in the first half of 2017, among the TOP15 color TV brands in the world, only the LeTV and Xiaomi brands of the Internet brands still dominated the traditional TV brands, with the total share of music sales falling 1.3% in the first half of the year. However, Decline in sales apparently not all were captured by Xiaomi, because Xiaomi sales growth in the total TV market was only 0.4%.
It is worth mentioning here that Sharp TV, since its acquisition by Foxconn, Sharp TV market action is very large, often seen in many variety shows, and with Foxconn excellent supply chain and production advantages, Sharp TV with very high Cost-effective and traditional brand influence increased significantly in sales this year, especially in the 60-inch market, a sudden emergence.Online and offline sales rose more than 700% and 200% respectively, becoming the fastest rising brand, Sharp TV set a target Is the impact of 14 million this year, and set the target of becoming the champion of domestic TV sales in 2018.
the reason
From the above table we can see that the overall smart TV market, the Internet brand new TV apparently did not replace the dominant position of the traditional TV brands, let alone occupy the smart TV market. Why such a situation and the smart phone market is not the same? After the rise of mobile phones, but a large number of Internet brands to replace the traditional feature phone brands.
Although there are many similarities between smart TVs and smartphones, the differences in market performance due to the different attributes of TV and mobile phones have different manifestations in the following aspects:
1. In the eyes of most consumers, television is not a fast-moving consumer electronics product. Therefore, the rate at which individuals or families purchase TVs will be much slower than that of mobile phones. The average family may spend 5 years to over 10 years before considering buying a new TV, This is a lot slower than replacing a handset with a mobile phone in a year or two, a slow update of new products that will make new brands grow more slowly than mobile phones, and if you want the experience of a smart TV , Buying an Internet TV box can quickly give a similar experience to traditional TVs, slowing down the user's motivation to change smart TVs.
2. China's smartphone sales were 560 million units in 2016, while smart TV sales were less than one-tenth of mobile phone sales and more than 50 million units. Compared with the huge market for smartphones, the market for smart TVs is small A lot while in this relatively small market, the number of traditional vendors can be quite a lot, the strength is also very powerful, which makes the Internet brand new market can move in the space of capacity will be much less.
3. The majority of smartphone buyers were young at first, and they were good at experimenting with new electronic devices, but for television, young people are mostly renting houses, and smart TVs are not the primary choice for young people. Home users are the primary buyers of television, and the family buying habits are more cautious, so the new Internet TV brands have been hoping to break through this group of young people to become the first smart TV for young people. Small 32-inch screen power, is the embodiment of this market breakthrough.
4. From functional phones to smart phones, the overall supply chain structure has undergone major changes, including the main control chip, display, touch screen and other smart phones in the bulk of these components, are in the era of the functional machine The new smartphone brand in the supply chain choice, and other mobile phone brands to stand a relatively equal starting line, based on the product pre-judgment, and grasp the supply chain order initiative.
In the era of smart TV, the display panel, which accounts for the highest price in the TV, is still mainly in the existing supply chain of traditional TV brands, and even TCL owns such panel factories as Huaxing Power. There are advantages, are new Internet TV brands do not have.
5. Traditional TV makers' early awakening of the Internet's intelligence has increased the difficulty of the growth of new brands on the Internet. The history of the smart phone brands replacing traditional mobile phone brands has sounded the alarm for traditional TV brands that they do not want to repeat Nokia and Moto Nora such a glorious destruction of the road.So, they also have set up their own Internet brands, such as Haier mooka, Skyworth's cool, TCL's Thunderbird, Konka's KKTV, Changhong's CHiQ and Hisense VIDAA, etc. .
6. Smartphones have drastically subverted the functionality of traditional mobile phones, and smartphones have moved away from the demand for feature-based mobile phones and turned into terminal devices that provide mobile Internet services.From the point of view of TV's product attributes From the point of view of the traditional or smart TV, the user's demand for television products has not changed, that is, through the big screen to watch the video, but from the previous cable television program, extended to a wider OTT video content.
The essential needs of this television product has not changed, it also determines the smart TV did not produce greater disruption.
7. Internet companies are very good at user experience design software applications, but because of the limitations of human-computer interaction TV, more from the remote control, interaction is relatively simple, and earlier traditional TV brands to absorb the Internet background Product manager to join, so in smart TV APP user experience and UI design compared to the area, has not become the decisive factor in widening the gap between the two.
8. The key advantage of smart TV is the richness of OTT content, but now these contents are mainly concentrated in the hands of BAT, IFC Art Video Tencent occupy the absolute superiority of video content, including Internet brand TV also need to cooperate with these companies , In order to provide rich video content for its own member users.Therefore, in the choice of video content, Internet TV brands and traditional TV brands on the same track, not much advantage.
9. One of the advantages that emerging Internet companies would have been able to take advantage of is that they are one step ahead of technological capabilities.As a highlight of artificial intelligence, voice manipulation has subverted the way that programs were selected via remote control. Under the current hot artificial intelligence environment, More and more consumers are recognizing this new way of manipulating television, but ASR and NLP technologies are not the advantages of Internet TV companies, and these key technologies are currently generally provided by third-party technology providers such as Itexam , And the technological capabilities provided by such third parties once again put the Internet TV brand and the traditional TV brand station on the same starting line almost at the same time.So this year we can see that the function of smart voice has fully blossomed in almost all TV manufacturers' new products. Although Internet companies are also doing new research and development of artificial intelligence, but still need to accumulate.
10. Finally, in the sales channels, traditional TV manufacturers have long mastered the online sales model, while the traditional offline channels are not the channels that Internet TV brands can rapidly expand. The long-term construction of offline sales channels is also New brand must make up homework.
The above 10 reasons, out of the new brand of Internet TV Why did not continue in the era of smart phones, new brand that period to replace the traditional brand history.
opportunity
Of course, as a new brand of the Internet, it is not without any chance of occupying a position of its own in the smart TV market.
1. Continuously deepen in the accumulation of technology to form their own unique technical barriers. By technical integration, you can allow themselves to pass the level of pass, but can not form beyond the strength of the direction of accumulation of technology by the direction of the product Determine, for example, the need to strengthen the voice control of the semantic understanding of television scenarios, etc. However, as a start-up television company, is not a professional technology company, how to define the product direction, how much manpower investment in the establishment of technical barriers is Strategies that must be weighed
2. Putting Effort into Operation On the recommendation of content, manual content editing combined with AI and big data recommendation helps users to analyze preferences, find the topics that users are interested in, and select the most recommended content from the complicated content to the users. Is also the focus of the online video companies are force at the same time, good at using the advantages of Internet operations, viscous interaction with users, so that viewers not only feel the audience is watching video, has become a participant in various activities.
3. The model of home-made dramas is also a model adopted by many video companies. In this respect, Internet TV is also trying its best. For example, the self-made drama "I Shop for the Forbidden City" made a very good result last year.
4. Utilizing the natural ability of Internet companies to accurately grasp the user experience, users are provided with the most extreme and rich experience in functional design and interactive display of products, and actively engage in new human-computer interaction attempts, such as gesturing by others , Face recognition, voiceprint recognition.
5. Focus on the size of the TV to choose, highlight their competitiveness, through the difference of play, do not have direct contact with traditional vendors, such as Xiaomi this year in 32-inch small-size market by playing the concept of a hundred machine, set off A wave of offensive.
6. With the current concept of smart home, the TV may also be able to evolve, not just look at the content of a large screen, and become an important control branch of the smart home, even if the TV can not become a control center in the future, Television can interact with more devices, including mobile phones, and extend the functionality of the television, a way to redefine the television that may be a promising opportunity for the emerging television brand, and of course the current smart home is still moving very fast Slow, lack of a strong scenario to educate users, this road will inevitably also be relatively long.
7. The key to TV is sound and picture quality. Although new display technologies such as HDR and 8K are not always in the hands of new brands, it is also an innovation to provide a complete set of automated matching display and sound modes based on video content the road.
Conclusion
The smart TV market for emerging Internet TV brand manufacturers is bound to be a more need for patience and time of the product track, not through short-term capital investment can subvert and long-term occupation of the market must be through continuous accumulation of technology and products, Ensure product quality, and gradually deepen the penetration of market channels and the establishment of the brand in this market access to their own loyal users.