Top of the Great Era

Chapter 3139 Going Back

The United States is a technological power, and an important symbol of this is the emphasis it places on science and technology.

One sign of the importance attached to technology is that it is extremely expensive.

Many technology companies in Silicon Valley have no ambition to make progress and rely on some B-side technology licensing to survive. Many technology companies don’t even have a R&D team. They just developed some technologies and obtained some patents in the early years, and then rely on these things to make a living for the rest of their lives.

These companies simply cannot survive in China.

But it is different in the United States. These things can often be sold at sky-high prices, allowing them to live comfortably, the bosses to make a lot of money, the employees to work easily and comfortably every day, and the welfare benefits are excellent. The level of employee treatment is not essentially provided by the boss. It is a systematic project, a game between employees and the entire social system.

Many domestic companies use American technology, which they really cannot afford.

too expensive.

Then they can only use some pirated products, or make high-quality imitations in the name of "self-research" to bypass American companies.

There's nothing we can do about it.

This is an inevitable choice in the market, not a simple black and white, right or wrong evaluation standard.

China is just a developing country and cannot afford the sky-high technical service fees charged by the American social system.

Zhou Buqi now takes many things lightly, and no longer has the misunderstandings he had in the early years regarding the sky-high technical service fees from the United States.

High prices have their own advantages, and these tangible benefits can benefit the entire social system.

The low cost in China is indeed conducive to the rapid promotion of technology and the rapid development of the industry, so that there are easily hundreds of online TV stations in China. A small company of a dozen people can operate a pirated online TV, and the shortcomings behind it are becoming more and more obvious.

However, after hearing what Robert Egger said, Zhou Buqi was still deeply stimulated.

This is too shocking!

Just to launch a legitimate online TV service for HBO, it took five years and cost $5 million? This is too much!

This is worse than robbing a bank.

Robert Iger said: "That was when HBO found a technical service provider in New York, but they felt the cost was too high, so the plan for online TV was delayed for many years."

"and after?"

Zhou Buqi realized the reason why the United States was developing "slowly". Online TV was already everywhere in China ten years ago. Many people went to Internet cafes to watch TV stations from South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong and Taiwan on online TV.

It's ironic in the United States that big companies like HBO have a hard time launching an online TV station.

Robert Iger said: "After searching in many places, one day, I found an opportunity in the sports industry, which is BAM under Major League Baseball. Their technical system is built by themselves, and it is mature and stable. The synchronization between TV stations and online TV is high and the signal is stable. They can even broadcast sports live, and of course, film and television live."

Zhou Buqi nodded, "So HBO went to seek cooperation with Major League Baseball."

Robert Iger smiled and said, "Yes, the cooperation is very good. It took BAM only three and a half months to build their online TV station for HBO, and the total cost was only 5000 million US dollars. With this precedent, the media industry's streaming transformation has found an affordable and efficient direction. Other TV stations like CBS and MTV that want to launch online TV stations also look for BAM to cooperate and use their technology."

“Affordable and efficient?”

Zhou Buqi laughed.

I feel like these laymen in the media are so easy to fool.

HBO wanted to make online TV, and spent $5000 million, and still thought it was too cheap and too affordable... If it were in China, a technical team of ten people could develop it in a week. If you want to be more cautious and launch a stable version, it can be done in less than a month, and the total cost is enough to be $100 million.

Zhou Buqi shook his head. "Although I haven't investigated, based on my understanding of the technology industry, for a project like this, if a Silicon Valley team were to do it, such as IBM, Cisco, Oracle, Microsoft and other service providers, the total cost would not exceed $1000 million." Robert Iger hesitated for a moment and said frankly, "In the entire media industry, no one believes in Silicon Valley."

"hehe."

"When the Internet industry in Silicon Valley first emerged, the media industry gave them huge support. For example, in the early days of Yahoo and AOL, many of their news sources were supported by the traditional media industry. But what happened later? After they became successful, they became ungrateful and swallowed up their former partners."

"Well, ungratefulness is a characteristic of Silicon Valley. I don't think it's a shortcoming. It's the spiritual attribute behind Silicon Valley's global technological era."

Zhou Buqi had long seen through the nature of Silicon Valley.

It's a lot like Wall Street in some ways.

The more outstanding and elite people are, the lower their loyalty is. Because of low loyalty, they keep changing jobs, which leads to the proliferation of experience, projects and engineering in the industry, intensifying competition and driving the rapid development of the industry.

Just like the rapid development in China, there must be support for piracy and indifference to intellectual property protection.

The traditional media industry is much more loyal than Silicon Valley. Once employees are too loyal, it is easy for them to become stagnant and unable to compete with the emerging media giants in Silicon Valley. The largest media giant in the United States is not Comcast, Viacom, Ziweixing Universal, Disney, or News Corporation, but Google.

Robert Iger said: "In short, the media industry is very wary of Silicon Valley. Google, Amazon, Facebook and other big technology companies are too scary. Once they learn from them, the things that replace them will definitely happen again."

Zhou Buqi sighed, "Bob, you still don't understand enough about technology."

"Ok?"

“Do you think you can escape Silicon Valley by using BAM’s technical services?”

"BAM is a streaming media company under the baseball league. It was founded earlier than YouTube and is a completely self-developed technology..."

"What you said is all right, but not comprehensive." Zhou Buqi interrupted him, "Live broadcasts of sports events, including online TV stations like HBO_Now, require a large amount of video and audio data to be transmitted to users during the streaming process. If it is a high-definition picture, the amount of data will be even greater."

Robert Iger said: "This is just like the upgrade from standard TV to high-definition TV, which requires upgrading to optical fiber that can transmit wider data. BAM's platform has been built for more than ten years. They have built data centers and achieved high-speed fiber connections."

Zhou Buqi smiled and said, "You are right, but have you ever thought about it? BAM has to provide technical services for online TV for CBS, HBO, WWE, MTV, as well as football, NBA and other organizations. How much service volume is this? How many users will it serve? Can the small data center built by BAM support such a large service system?"

"what?"

Robert Egger was slightly stunned.

Zhou Buqi said calmly, "Even if we don't consider this, let's assume that BAM's data center technology is very powerful and the number of server clusters is huge, and it can support so many services at the same time... But this data center is in the United States. It can't possibly serve Europe, Asia, and South America, right? HBO's online TV station can now be watched online all over the world. Who is the server-side support behind it?"

Robert Egger's face changed drastically.

He is a director of Apple and has not resigned.

Apple immediately comes to mind.

The Hollywood hacking incident this time was mainly caused by the leakage of Apple Cloud...The reason why Apple wants to create Apple Cloud is because the data flow of photos is too large and ordinary data centers cannot supply it. It is necessary to build powerful cloud data centers around the world.

Because of the cloud data center and cloud services, hackers had the opportunity to invade and steal many private photos of female celebrities.

Even the data streaming of photos is like this...

What’s more, film and television content?

  The data scale of movies and TV shows is hundreds or even thousands of times that of photos!

Many of BAM’s customers now provide global services, which requires a global cloud computing platform!

And once it comes to cloud computing platform, it must be a product of Silicon Valley!

I was carefully avoiding the big companies in Silicon Valley, but I didn't expect to end up back where I left off!