After the Winter Olympics, can the traffic of Migu videos still be retained?

Reporter | Liu Yanqiu

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During the Winter Olympics, the previously unknown Migu video once soared to the second place in the Apple Store download list.

During the live broadcast of the Migu Video Winter Olympics, Wang Meng continued to rush to the hot search for the short-track speed skating mixed relay race. "My eyes are rulers" "I not only brought a 'ruler', but also a stopwatch to ensure that every moment can not escape my eyes"... With the fermentation of these golden sentences, this former Legend of the Chinese Short Track Speed Skating Team was jokingly called "Mao Lord" by netizens. As the topic of the event continues to heat up, Migu, as the official broadcaster of the Winter Olympics, has also begun to be known by more people. Benefiting in part from Migu's impact, on February 9, its parent company China Mobile also received its first stop-and-go board since its listing on January 5, and its stock price hit a new high.

In 2014, in order to cope with the impact of the rapid growth of the mobile Internet on operators, China Mobile established Migu. The entire Migu company has five subsidiaries and business segments: Migu Music, Migu Video, Migu Digital Media, Migu Interactive Entertainment, and Migu Animation. Among them, Migu Video was established in Shanghai in 2015, its predecessor is the China Mobile mobile video base established in 2006, and its main business is Migu Video.

Migu Video's first official involvement in sports events began in the 2018 World Cup in Russia, when it spent 1 billion yuan to buy the rights to the CCTV World Cup, and invited well-known commentators such as Zhan Jun, Li Yuankui, and Yan Qiang to press the team. Later, Migu announced her record: during the World Cup, a total of 4.3 billion people watched the World Cup through Migu video. Among them, the number of spectators on the day of the final exceeded the 200 million mark. With the help of the World Cup, Migu's single-day users have grown by more than 10 million, and the number of downloads has entered the top three of the video rankings.

The opportunity to broadcast the Winter Olympics began in 2020, when In December of that year, Migu announced that it had reached a cooperation with CCTV to become the top partner of CCTV in the broadcast of the four events of the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games, the 2020 European Cup, the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, and the 2022 Qatar World Cup, providing live broadcast and on-demand content of these four events.

Migu isn't the only platform to get the rights to the Winter Olympics. CCTV has exclusive all-media rights and sub-licensing rights at the Beijing Winter Olympics 2022 Winter Olympics Chinese mainland (including Macao). In the Chinese mainland, Tencent, Kuaishou, Beijing Winter Olympic Documentary Channel, Shanghai Five Star Sports Channel, Guangdong Sports Channel and other five other units have also been authorized by CCTV. However, there are certain differences in the permissions obtained by each family. For example, Kuaishou and Tencent Video and CCTV have reached a strategic cooperation on the broadcast video of the Winter Olympics, which can bring users on-demand and short video content. Migu Video has full rights and interests in the live broadcast of the whole event, and users can meet the needs of the game through live broadcasting and back-to-look, which can be said that the copyright advantage is obvious.

In addition to world sports events, Migu has won the Champions League, Premier League, La Liga, Serie A, Bundesliga, Ligue 1 in the field of football, and the five major european football leagues can be watched on Migu. According to Lazy Bear Sports, Migu has spent more than 10 billion yuan on sports rights purchases alone in recent years. The broadcast rights of mainstream sports events on the market, except for the NBA and the Premier League, have almost all been exhausted by Migu.

But for sporting events, the acquisition of copyright is only the first step, and how it is subsequently operated is also crucial. From this perspective, Migu's operational performance during this year's Winter Olympics is remarkable.

Why can Wang Meng go out of the circle? Lu Shihan, a science and technology blogger, believes that behind this is actually the changes brought about by technological development to the content of communication. The olympic games, for the first time in history, used a full cloud broadcast, and the difference between the satellite and front-line broadcast vehicle system in the past is that the information systems such as event results, event broadcasting, and information release were all migrated to the official "Olympic Cloud". It can be simply understood that this Olympic Games provides an official material library, and all authorized platforms can take the materials themselves to edit, can do serious reporting, can also do personalized, and even do ghost animals.

Migu has seized the opportunity of personalized broadcasting brought about by technological developments. In addition to the "shooting combination" composed of Huang Jianxiang and Wang Meng, Migu Video also has more than 150 commentators, including Famous Mouths such as Song Shixiong, Han Qiaosheng, Liu Jianhong, Yang Jian, as well as Olympic champions and world champions such as Li Jianrou, Zhou Yang, Chen Lu and Zhang Hao. On the one hand, these professional athletes can provide a more authoritative perspective, on the other hand, they can also bring a more personalized interpretation to the audience. In addition, Migu's virtual anchor also appeared in the live broadcast room of the Winter Olympics - as a special commentator, Winter Olympic champion Gu Ailing super realistic number intelligence Meet GU appeared in the Migu video studio.

Image source: Migu Video Weibo

But how to retain these sports KOLs also tests Migu's subsequent operational capabilities.

On the one hand, from various measures, it can be seen that Migu wants to be deeply bound to Wang Meng. Before the Winter Olympics, Migu invited Wang Meng to participate in the micro-variety show "Boiling It!" which focused on the selection of the new generation of commentators. Commentator", also tailored a sports reality show variety show "Sportsman Lianmao" for Wang Meng. In the future, the audience can also see Wang Meng in Migu sports event commentary, self-made variety shows, video ringtones, fitness classes, etc., in addition, Migu will also open cooperation with Wang Meng's sports MCN agency.

But what cannot be ignored is that other platforms are also dividing up Wang's traffic. Taking Douyin as an example, as early as July 2021, Wang Meng released the first video on Douyin. Douyin also specially opened a live broadcast program "The Lord is Coming" for Wang Meng, and the hot search "Wang Meng kicked Wu Dajing out of the live broadcast room" happened in "The Lord is coming". As of the interface reporter's press release, Wang Meng's fans on Douyin exceeded 6.8 million, which has surpassed Tian Liang and Lin Dan. After Wang Meng entered the B station, he released a video "Just got off the commentary station, really when I don't go to the B station?" It also received 6.13 million plays and nearly 10,000 bullet screens.

When the event is over, how to retain users is a more difficult problem. Sports enthusiast Xiao Wang's use behavior is quite representative, he told interface news, because the Tokyo Olympics only know migu, during the Olympic Games to watch the game will be used, but the Olympic Games after the past will not be used, to this year's Winter Olympics began to use Migu again. iResearch data also shows that on the opening day of the 2018 World Cup, the number of daily active users of Migu Video exceeded 12 million, the number of daily new users exceeded 10 million, and the growth rate of active people in the entire month of June exceeded 90%. But by the end of the World Cup, Migu's daily activity rate dropped from 1.7 percent to 0.6 percent to 1.2 percent.

Huge copyright investment is also difficult to make Migu profitable in the short term. Unlike many video sites, Migu did not launch any dedicated sports memberships, but launched a membership package of 18 yuan per month, including 8 pass-through coupons.

What many people don't know is that Migu Video takes sports as a breakthrough, but in fact, it is also a comprehensive video platform, and there are movies, web dramas, variety shows and other content, but the attention of these contents cannot be compared with sports. According to QuestMobile China Mobile Internet's 2021 first half report, the top five daily active users in the online video app industry in the first half of 2021 were iQiyi, Tencent Video, Youku Video, Mango TV and Bilibili. Migu Video failed to make it into the top five of the industry.

However, in the past two years, Migu has also increased its investment in film and television content. It is worth mentioning that in May 2019, China Mobile announced an investment of 1.6 billion yuan in Mango Super Media to become the second largest shareholder, and the two sides have strong business complementarity and strategic synergy value in traffic management, home wide business, content operation, especially content cooperation with Migu Company. After that, Migu signed an overall cooperation framework agreement with Mango TV with a cooperation amount of not less than 3.5 billion yuan for 2021-2023 - now on Migu Video, you can see Mango TV variety shows such as "Every Day Upward".

The metacosm is also the latest development direction proposed by Migu. At the "2021 China Mobile Global Partner Conference", Liu Xin, general manager of China Mobile Migu, also said that Migu will invest more resources to continue to deepen the four major fields of 5G+MSC, 5G+video CRBT, 5G+cloud games, and 5G+XR, and take the 5G information high-speed rail to accelerate the meta-universe.

"Watch the Winter Olympics, on the Migu video", this year's Winter Olympics made Migu's reputation louder, what to do after that, whether to take advantage of the situation to reverse the pattern or to be silent again, testing the wisdom and determination of the platform.