Writer: Huang Xuejiao
RR.tv (人人视频), a video platform aggregating overseas video content, has just completed its B plus financing round. The financing round was led by Chenhai Capital and saw participation from SAIF Partners, Peeli Ventures and Xu Xin, investor from Capital Today. Baidu also invested strategically in RR.tv in this round.
According to RR.tv, the investment will be mainly used for research & development, buying copyrights and marketing. RR.tv was founded in 2014. At the very beginning, the team, aspiring to build a bridge between the Chinese audience and overseas TV dramas with its translated versions, was bent solely on bringing in American TV dramas.
This has helped it rack up a fair number of followers of American TV dramas and overseas pop culture.
In early 2016, RR.tv started to double down on short videos and diversify its offerings to include such categories as entertainment, side stories of films, music, and technology.
What sets RR.tv apart from other short video platforms are probably its focus on overseas video content and its loyal followers.
RR.tv, according to the team, has registered an average play duration of over an hour each day. The team told Kr-Asia that almost 85% of its users are aged between 16 and 35. They are mostly students and white-collar workers.
As of now it has amassed over 60 million users. It also sees over 10 million active users each month.
RR.tv delivers predominantly self-produced contents and PGC (professional generated content). The platform currently has over 20,000 content creators. The number of videos uploaded via its app now reaches 5500+ each day. Now, the total number of videos on the platform has surpassed 1 million, which together have been played nearly 7 billion times.
The number of videos, besides the quality, is also a major indicator of how well a platform is run. To bring more videos onto its platform, RR.tv is now making its efforts in two directions.
- On the one hand, RR.tv is automating subtitles translation by incorporating Baidu and Google’s AI-powered translation. With the help of AI-powered translation, RR.tv can now throw onto its platform over 10,000 videos each day. Well, of course, machines are not as smart as human, so the translated subtitles will still have to be proofread by the staff.
- On the other hand, RR.tv is building its own content production base in Wuhan, which can accommodate several hundreds of employees. The base will mainly be dedicated to translating and editing short videos of different languages. The number of videos to be translated is huge. There are over 100,000 videos brought in from over 30 overseas copyright owners and MCN operators.
RR.tv is now looking to monetize its platform by extending into such areas as advertising, video games and e-commerce as well as by taking cuts from overseas copyright owners.
The team hopes that its platform could evolve into a video platform offering overseas video contents for Chinese around the world.
Well, the question is, will RR.tv be able to retain its followers as it shifts away from quality American TV dramas to entertaining short videos?