25 Jun ’21 – Driving a cart in ragged clothes to break fresh ground
Read the blog in Chinese here.
筚路蓝缕，以启山林 is a Chinese idiom that roughly translates as “driving a cart in ragged clothes to break fresh ground”. From humble beginnings come great things.
Glenn van der Meer is Tiledmedia’s Business Development Manager for Greater China. He may not be dressed in ragged clothes, but he has definitely broken new ground in the past four months. After a month of quarantine, Glenn opened up the Tiledmedia China office. You can find it in Dream Town, Hangzhou, an important innovation hotspot for AR and VR companies. Glenn is well connected in China; he has been talking to partners and customers in China for the last 2 years. It’s safe to say that Tiledmedia now has a small but sturdy foothold in China.
Following his arrival, he made trips to Nanjing, Shanghai, Beijing, Xiamen and Shenzhen to visit potential partners and customers. Visiting companies and meeting people working in all parts of the VR streaming distribution chain in real life again makes Glenn optimistic about the state of the VR industry in China. “I see an industry moving ahead and forming a healthy ecosystem for both the domestic market as well as an industry that is influencing the international VR market”.
One determining factor is the release of a new generation of VR headsets. Pico has just released its stand-alone Neo 3 6DoF headset for consumers in China, HTC just released the stand alone Focus Pro for business applications, Skyworth announced a mobile phone-tethered headset and other brands like DPVR, iQiyi, Nolo and Huawei are coming up with new headsets in this year as well. All this makes it likely that 2021 will be the year of VR headsets entering the mainstream in China. A remaining challenge for mainstream adoption however is the fragmented VR software ecosystem in China.
11K 3D
For Tiledmedia, the 8K decoding capability and the high screen resolution of some of the new VR devices is interesting news. These features enable playback of up to 11K 3D and 16K 2D VR video with our ClearVR SDK software. Also our PRC-based ClearVR Cloud transcoding platform already supports such resolutions. This results in an even more immersive experience for viewers.
Glenn is engaged in extensive testing with partners to ensure our proven solution in the West, e.g. for BT premier League, works equally well in the Chinese ecosystem. “It is really amazing how well the ClearVR videos work on 5G here in China”, says Glenn, “and at home I enjoy testing really cool 12K and 16K ClearVR videos on my Skyworth headset”.
Glenn has also been working hard on partnerships in China, an important part of doing business. Tiledmedia works closely with FXG, located in the same Dream Town office in Hangzhou. FXG , a partner since 2019, provides very high-quality immersive content, captured by their professional cameras and production crew. A perfect match with Tiledmedia’s high quality, low bandwidth ClearVR distribution solution.
Best of Breed
We also work with best-of-breed VR camera manufacturers like Insta360, and Kandao, who have customers around the world. To distribute VR in high quality, a good CDN is essential. Tiledmedia has been working with several major media and telecommunications companies in China, to optimize ClearVR delivery over their CDNs. Additionally, Tiledmedia has a long-standing distributor partnership with CDN company Wangsu, who provide excellent support for Tiledmedia’s ClearVR streaming. Glenn says: “Wangsu’s network responds really fast, resulting in superior ClearVR quality in my headset or mobile, I am really happy with their performance.“
We expect much more news to come out of China, it is an exciting time to work on VR streaming and many big events like the Beijing Olympics 2022 are coming in the next years.
Subscribe to our newsletter below to keep up to date and feel free to reach out to Glenn or any of his colleagues for more information. You can meet up with Glenn in Hangzhou, or at one of the many trade shows such as CIAVC. He will be happy to explain ClearVR further, and give you a demonstration.
WeChat: glennvandermeer
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Stay tuned!