Alibaba Buddies Up with Star-studded Partner Team to Deepen Forays into Digital Living Room Market

Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba announced today a plan to construct an all-around family entertainment ecosystem that covers the fields of films & movies, music, game, education and e-commerce based on its set-top-box product Tmall Box.

Alibaba continues its cooperation with Wasu Media, one of the several state-authorized content providers, in entertainment contents. Wasu Media will contribute more than 6,000 movies and 150,000 hours of TV plays to the ecosystem, according to Liu Chunning, president of Alibaba’s Digital Entertainment Business Department. Alibaba also teamed up with Dolby and DTS, two audio technology companies, to provide better audio and visual experiences. The music contents will be streamed from Xiami, a subsidiary of Alibaba.

In terms of games, Alibaba integrated ten cloud-based games into the system, including several blockbuster games developed by Konami, 2K, and Falcom. Since these games are based on cloud, users can play directly without downloading them to local. Alibaba also joined hands with global leading game developers of EA, Gameloft, Glu Mobile to present more diversified games.

As online education is in full swing, Alibaba tapped this sector by partnering up with TutorABC, the online English leaning brand under  Tutor Group, to provide real-time interactive language learning services. The cooperation seems quite natural given that Alibaba has led a nearly US$100 million Series B financing in Tutor Group earlier this year. The contents from child-focused services of Qiaohu, a brand run by Japanese education group Benesse Corporation, and Beva will land on the system this August.

Liu emphasized that all the contents will be regulated under DRM (digital right management) to protect the intellectual rights of content providers.

At the press conference, the internet giant also released two interesting functions for Tmall Box. One is a voice command feature that allows users to search for films and music by voice. The other is M Key, a button dedicated to e-commerce services, like special sales, etc.

Liu Chunning Demonstrating Voice Command Feature and M Key