How will Tencent Video’s expansion of TikTok affect the next competitive cycle in the audio-visual industry?

Tencent Video announced a partnership with the short video platform Douyin, bringing the "strengths of long and short videos" into a new stage. What kind of inspiration and thinking can we get from this? Welcome to discuss together.

Finally, the cooperation between long and short videos has ushered in a historic moment.

Following the cooperation between Kuaishou and LeTV, and between Douyin, Sohu and iQiyi in the past year, Tencent Video also announced today that it has reached a cooperation with the short video platform Douyin. The two parties will cooperate on the joint promotion of long and short videos and the derivative creation of short videos, and promote a new pattern of mutual promotion and win-win cooperation between long and short videos.

There is no doubt that Tencent Video, which has been contributing high-quality content for a long time, can finally move towards "content licensing" cooperation with short video platforms, which once again proves the value potential of high-quality content and is an important achievement of long video platforms embracing open cooperation with long-termism.

At the same time, the strong cooperation between the two parties also reflects the long and short video platforms' understanding of the long-term needs of users.

In fact, from the perspective of providing users with high-quality content to the greatest extent possible, long and short videos are essentially "comrades-in-arms" standing on the same front. As the two sides are able to enter a state of cooperation, how to better promote creation, dissemination and market expansion is a topic that needs to be discussed by the industry together.

The cooperation between Tencent Video and Douyin has undoubtedly brought the "strengths of long and short videos" to a new stage. While establishing a broader cooperation mechanism for long and short videos and innovating copyright cooperation to play a demonstration effect, the continued positive interaction will inevitably promote the sustainable development of the entire domestic content industry.

01 Protect secondary creation and make good content worthwhile

The cooperation between long and short videos can be said to be an inevitable trend, and from the regulatory level to ordinary audiences, people have begun to express support for these practices of realizing the interests of all parties through commercial cooperation.

During the 7th China Internet Copyright Protection and Development Conference held last month, the China Copyright Association released the "Ten Major Events in China's Copyright in 2022", and long-short video cooperation was selected among them.

The article mentioned that as an emerging industry in the field of digital copyright, short video platforms should strengthen copyright cooperation with long video platforms and obtain more long video copyright authorizations, which will have positive significance for the industry's copyright governance and win-win development.

This is also closely related to the continued popularity of short video re-creation in the past few years and the changes in the overall environment of long and short video platforms. For creators, due to the long-term ambiguity of rules, they have never been able to obtain a stable creative environment, which has indirectly damaged the vitality of creators.

Secondhand works on short video platforms

How can we protect the creations of short video platforms without harming the interests and creators of long video platforms?

The secondary creation authorization mechanism between long and short videos may be the final answer.

On March 17, 2022, long and short video platforms ushered in a breakthrough cooperation - Douyin took the lead in announcing a cooperation with Sohu, obtaining the relevant authorization for the secondary creation of all Sohu's self-produced film and television works. This is also the first time that long and short video platforms have reached a "consensus" on the secondary creation of film and television works. Subsequently, iQiyi also reached a cooperation with Douyin.

With the official cooperation between Tencent Video and Douyin, it can be said that the cooperation between the two major content platforms of long and short videos has finally brought this win-win cooperation to a new height.

Tencent Video, in particular, has demonstrated its impressive content advantages in the past two years. Starting from the improvement of quality and reduction of quantity at the end of 2021, the efficient era of "Quality Drama 3.0" has spawned high-quality, highly acclaimed, and highly popular dramas such as "The Beginning", "Dream of Hualu", and "The Three-Body Problem" since 2022, and the number is enough to cover the whole year. This is proof that the head video platform such as Tencent Video has a rich library of good content.

All signs indicate that the cooperation between long and short videos has entered a mature stage.

On the one hand, short videos are an important window for film and television publicity, and creators’ explanations of original works are also a means of publicity;

On the other hand, original works can provide materials for creators and enrich the content ecology of short video platforms. In the pursuit of win-win results for both parties, "authorization before use" is expected to become a reference for copyright solutions for both long and short video platforms in the future.

The cooperation between long and short video platforms is an innovation and development trend in the film and television industry. Both parties will achieve mutual benefit in terms of content, users and revenue, and jointly promote the innovation and development of the film and television industry. This cooperation has many benefits not only for platforms and creators, but also for audiences.

"2023 China Internet Audiovisual Development Research Report"

At the same time, Tencent Video can also obtain certain copyright or advertising revenue from the short video platform, which is obviously in line with the current background of "reducing costs and increasing efficiency" for long videos. As a short video platform, Douyin can use Tencent Video's long video content to provide short video creators with more materials and inspiration, stimulate their creative enthusiasm and creative expression, and thus improve the quality and diversity of short video content.

There is no doubt that as the vague standards and rules for secondary creative content no longer become a stumbling block for creators, the corresponding content creation ecosystem will only become more prosperous in the future, thereby releasing the value of high-quality film and television content.

02 Learn from each other’s strengths and make up for each other’s weaknesses, and work together to create a win-win situation

The cooperation between long and short videos will obviously have a positive effect on both the video industry and the entire Internet industry. And from the perspective of the video industry itself, the cooperation between long and short videos is conducive to the long-term development of the entire online video industry.

First of all, the cooperation between the two parties is expected to expand the video industry and bring more growth to the industry.

According to the latest data from the "2023 China Internet Audio-Visual Development Research Report": As of December 2022, the scale of Internet audio-visual users in my country reached 1.04 billion, and the Internet audio-visual usage rate of netizens was 97.4%, an increase of 1.4 percentage points year-on-year, maintaining a stable growth at a high level. In 2022, the market size of the pan-Internet audio-visual industry was 727.44 billion yuan, an increase of 4.4% over 2021.

"2023 China Internet Audiovisual Development Research Report"

Obviously, short videos have become an indispensable part of people's daily lives. At the same time, long videos have brought increasingly abundant and high-quality film and television resources under the background of "improving quality and reducing quantity" in the past two years. Both have their own advantages on both the supply and demand sides.

Regarding how long and short video platforms can achieve healthy cooperation, Zhao Hui, professor at the Communication University of China and secretary-general of the Short Video Working Committee of the China Television Drama Production Industry Association, mentioned before that the value of the copyright of digital audio-visual products is reflected in the incremental value created through dissemination. Without widespread dissemination, the value of the copyright cannot be reflected.

Long video and short video platforms have jointly built a three-dimensional and diverse audio-visual ecological system. The value of video copyright is no longer limited to the media field. In addition to paying attention to protection mechanisms, we must also build new mechanisms for copyright co-construction and sharing.

From a business perspective, as leading companies in their respective fields, the cooperation between Tencent Video and Douyin marks the beginning of a new win-win model for long and short videos. The former can further expand the influence and coverage of its content, while the latter can continue to obtain high-quality content. This is of great significance for long and short videos to achieve mutual benefit.

Secondly, the cooperation between the two parties is also expected to improve the business efficiency of the entire content industry.

As the two parties are able to gradually reach long-term cooperation and form a virtuous interaction through continuous running-in, more business collaboration and learning from each other's strengths will greatly reduce the pressure on both parties. At the same time, it will also allow more resources to be invested in the main business, thereby improving their respective efficiency.

Therefore, now all long and short video companies can find a suitable way to cooperate - short videos can successfully obtain the sub-authorization of long videos, and at the same time actively promote long videos; long videos have gained traffic, and the creation environment of short videos is more friendly. For creators, they can also obtain more "film and television secondary creation" materials and enrich the content. The trend of long and short videos moving towards win-win cooperation is obviously where it is.

The cooperation between Tencent Video and Douyin also represents the beginning of the Internet giants to avoid disorderly development. Long and short videos can balance the interests of all parties and jointly promote the innovation and development of the audio-visual industry by establishing a reasonable copyright authorization and profit-sharing system, an effective copyright supervision and protection mechanism, and a benign interaction and cooperation mechanism.

More importantly, the emerging long- and short-term collaborations also have obvious benefits for users: they can watch more high-quality film and television content on different platforms to meet different viewing needs and preferences; at the same time, they can also participate in more interactions and discussions to increase the fun and experience of watching; more diverse content viewing methods can also further enhance users' stickiness to Internet audio-visual content.

At a time when competition for Internet traffic and user attention is becoming increasingly scarce, only openness, inclusiveness and resource sharing can achieve win-win results for all parties. The current collaboration between long-term and short-term players is precisely the true beginning of this win-win era.

Author: Uncle Yi Team

Source public account: Yiyuguancha (ID: yiyuguancha), the telescope and sonar of the pan-entertainment industry.