Alibaba’s First Step in Multimedia
In the end of July 2015, I happened to watch Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation in Korea. Since I am not a huge fan of action movies, I decided not to recommend the movie to someone, but Rogue Nation had enough of their trusted audiences members in attendance for their ongoing Mission Impossible series. The movie itself bored me until the ending credits. In the movie credits, Alibaba Pictures Group, as a movie investor, had its own short 5-second scene with its own Alibaba logo!
Alibaba Group is a highly successful Chinese e-commerce company. And the firm has created their film company, which once was ChinaVision Media, bought a major share in 2014. Jack Ma (Ma Yun's company) bought a 60% share of a Hong Kong film company that was losing money, ChinaVision Media, for USD $1.3 billion, and Alibaba Pictures then entered agreements with filmmakers and film companies. Since then, Alibaba Pictures has distributed, invested, sponsored, and produced four movies, including a Hollywood’s Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation. The film company is stretching their feet into the major film market, adding joint films into their filmography.
Seeing a large e-commerce company expanding their field into multimedia markets is a rare scene. In the United States, Amazon created a streaming service, Amazon Prime, but it is not a film production/investment company. Unlike Amazon, Alibaba is well-known for being the most valuable retailer, without inventory. The irony is that Alibaba is developing their film inventory while Amazon is providing multimedia streaming service. Entering the media industry, Alibaba Pictures must have seen a future investment in entertainment content.
Where is the future of entertainment content heading? Investing, sponsoring, creating, producing, streaming, big tech companies are getting their hands into entertainment in so many routes, at the expense (I am not sure what you meant here.) of their major services or products. Until now, Apple and Google opened their music selling and TV streaming markets, while Amazon came up with Amazon Prime for streaming, thus making streaming multimedia a major entertainment market to e-commerce companies. But, now Alibaba is taking a different but classic, route but classic. Would the firm go to big data / content business? In a year, they have already made four movies in that realm, taking a part of the extraordinary business route to mark their debut in Hollywood. The Wolf Totem (2015) trailer clip has already been posted on YouTube.
Except for the investment of the Rogue Nation, Alibaba is taking a typical international film-producing company including making a licensing deal with NBCUniversal. If this is their effort to expand their entertainment business into multimedia content, Alibaba Pictures has succeeded on its first stop to transform, even though it lost US $24 million in first half of 2015.
Holding more original creativity works is now becoming a big essential market that has been placed into many media firms. Google has been buying so many patents, despite their main services. Alibaba Pictures are moving their film industry field, and collaborating with many major media and entertainment companies. They will succeed on their creative business model engaging in the production and marketing of entertainment, news, and information products in a global customer base.
