Millet TV, Big fall

Wen/Jinguo Knife

Millet this year's product launch of the theme is called the Day of the Dragon Slaughter, later was interpreted as representing two star products: Millet 3 and Millet TV, in fact, in the previous scenario, relying on the days of the Dragon does not contain millet TV, but millet TV by the ultimate performance to become another scream class products.

Millet TV almost died, why? Just enough screaming, this is also a key factor in the success of Millet TV:

1, the biggest pain point of the intelligent television is the computer. What is smart TV? Many people have many answers. Chuan's answer is straightforward: the computer. He thinks Smart TV should be a supercomputer.

2, the Ultimate. About the pursuit of the ultimate definition, Chuan has a word in the millet widely circulated: the ultimate is to drive themselves mad, forcing others to death.

3, let the user participate in the design. In the Millet box period, the Millet box just want to do a function-play online video, but user feedback found that up to 80% of the users in the forum have indicated the need for "local playback" feature. The location of the millet TV is similar to that of the millet mobile phone: The young man's first television. However, the real TV is not young people, the final development team set up five user models, of which the typical user has three kinds: preschool children, retired elderly and housewives, these three groups were identified as the main users of Millet TV.

= = = Drive Crazy Split Line:

Source: Timeline magazine in Hin Lei

When the millet TV is only 3 months to be released, the founder of Millet Science and technology, more to see the CEO Chuan but deeply into self-doubt. He began to worry that the millet TV that his team had developed was not good enough to attract users to buy.

Not only Chuan, almost all executives at the Millet TV development team suffer from anxiety disorder. As the product release time is getting closer, people are getting less and less confident about the smart TV, and a lot of people are getting into a restless state. They can not help but ask themselves or ask their colleagues quietly: This TV is how to sell, who on earth would like this thing?

Despite years of experience in the field of intelligent hardware, Chuan and his team's CV have previously had only one piece of hardware that was successfully listed-a smart box with a palm size.

In the second half of last year, they belong to more and more science and technology by Millet acquisition, a lot of people hope to prove their real action as soon as possible. So, is it a laptop or a tablet? They have faced many options, but Chuan chose to develop a smart TV. He believes that the 47-inch screen of millet TV will become a leader in this new market, as the best proof of the strength of the hardware team.

Millet TV is the most important hardware product for both the millet company and the team. At the same time, the development of this product has also been lifted to unprecedented heights, it will take a new layer of underlying technology and interactive design. To this end, Chuan mobilized the team's best more than 100 engineers.

But the difficulty is still beyond expectations. A number of people in charge told the timeline, the development process several times, they almost gave up the smart TV. One of the most dangerous, they can't get two of pieces of core chips that never run together in a smooth sync. No matter how ambitious the design of millet TV is, if the final product cannot be introduced, it is nothing. Chuan told his engineers: I can't accept such a product.

After all the technical problems have been solved, the whole project development team has fallen into aesthetic fatigue and even lost confidence in the millet TV. They were nervously involved in the preparations for the September launch of the Millet television, fearing that criticism and ridicule would come after the launch. Millet brand influence through the network set up, where easy to generate praise, but also welcome to ridicule, curse.

The first positive change took place at the press conference, when executives saw the display of the millet TV design and felt the TV was much more beautiful than the messy development environment.

In that hot and unusual press conference, the millet TV UE director Li Shing quietly squeezed into the meeting, witnessed the LEI published Millet TV after the enthusiasm of the audience. "Listen to the feedback from the scene, I'm a little bit crying." I have never experienced such a product. Li Shing told the timeline. On the evening of the press conference, Chuan and the team had a drunken meal.

Where did the millet TV almost die?

What is smart TV? Many people have many answers. Chuan's answer is straightforward: the computer. He thinks Smart TV should be a supercomputer.

As a believer in jobs, he believes that all the products that jobs has developed in his life are essentially a supercomputer. Only on a single computer can you rely on different applications to bring a completely different user experience. TV Live, online video, TV games and other functions, have become an application of intelligent television, just as the phone function is just an iphone or an application of Android phone. This has become Chuan's product philosophy.

Of course, there is no such thing as an intelligent TV application or feature that can really subvert the user experience, and most likely the first one to assume the role or the game, but it will take some time. But Chuan and his team believe the day will come soon.

Chuan's insistence on turning live television into an application of intelligent television an important reason is that only in this mode, the user regardless of the live Hunan TV "Where is Dad", or watching the online American drama video, he saw the user interface and the use of control methods can be unified.

In theory, Millet has successfully developed a "super computer"-millet mobile phone, from an architectural point of view, can even see the millet TV as a giant screen of the millet mobile phone. So how can it be so difficult to develop a giant screen phone? To achieve Chuan This product philosophy, millet television several times almost died, the final product release time, also than the original April years after the last six months, behind the music and Archie art behind.

"What's a really good design? It's simple to use and complex to handle. Daiqingsong, head of the Millet TV product and supply chain, said to the timeline, "like Apple's products, you see a simple and Easy-to-use interface, but the technology is actually very complex." You just rely on the interface layer to solve the problem, a lot of user scenarios you can not do it. ”

Many so-called smart TV, the bottom of the main structure is still a traditional TV, and then add a smart chip, to achieve online video and other functions. Users are required to switch between traditional TV systems and intelligent systems using remote controls. Millet thought that such an interactive functional experience was not good enough, then adopted a very complex design of the underlying motherboard--equivalent to a mobile phone board, add a TV chip as an input source, to support the live TV function. TV is one of the paintings. All the UI runs on Qualcomm's smart chip, and the TV is just one component on the circuit board.

However, the motherboard circuit design will be completely different. It is this key development work that almost makes the millet TV can not be released.

This design idea is not the millet first, the Millet CPU supplier Qualcomm also took out a set of corresponding reference design. But chuan that the package does not reach his standards, he asked the TV executives: Why do we use other people's ready-made plans?

In short, Chuan's team used a TV chip that was better compatible with Chinese TV signals, but didn't have a reference design, replacing some of the chips in the reference program, and then developed a new design that allows the two chips to work together stably and efficiently.

"I'm sure it's going to work that way," he said. So Qualcomm's solution, including the circuit many things we have to change, so we have a lot of work. Chuan told timeline, "I think everyone will approve of this plan when I'm done because it's reasonable." I gave them the wrong try and told them it was OK. ”

"In fact, we have done so much complicated work at the bottom, just to make the application look more comfortable and provide a unified user experience." "Millet TV BSP director Zhu Yu told The Economist.

Zhu Yu is responsible for the BSP team less than 30 people, is the development of this set of chip agreement, they have more than 7 years experience in mobile phone system development. Zhu Yu, who was the head of Motorola Linux kernel Research and development in 2009, led the team to participate in the OPhone Mobile OS development, the first Android custom development system in China. He and his current team members are the first group of engineers in China to develop an android system.

The engineers chose a MStar TV chip for the Millet TV to partner with Qualcomm CPU. According to the data provided by Millet, MStar, a company that has focused on the TV market for decades, has 70% shares in the Chinese television market. It is chosen because it has a good support for non-standard TV signals, and its compatibility is best in the Chinese market. The entire development team suffers from Chuan's pairing of the best compatible TV chips with the most powerful smart processors.

In this development, Qualcomm, the engineer of the television product design, will fly to see the office and improve the architecture. About the pursuit of the ultimate definition, Chuan has a word in the millet widely circulated: the ultimate is to drive themselves mad, forcing others to death.

This new chip-matching solution requires more than just hardware problems, but also the stability of the Android system running on this new architecture. What Millet strives to do is to ensure the stability of the Android system itself, and to make sure it is more compatible. Engineers used various stress tests for three months to ensure the stability of the millet TV in all situations. In addition to a 7x24-hour video playback test, there will also be frequent switching stations, repetitive boot, repetitive brush machine upgrades, frequent switching of signal sources and other stress tests.

"Our goal is to integrate the TV system and the Android system well," he said. And many of the traditional TV manufacturers of the products, live TV and the Android interface is completely two worlds. It's not fusion, it's building blocks. Zhu Yu smiled and said.

Today, the biggest obstacle for users to achieve unified control and UI on millet TV is the cable TV set-top box with different specifications throughout the country. The Millet TV team is working with a local cable operator to discuss ways to work together. This year is expected to be in the North wide area, through the installation of millet homemade cable set-top box to achieve a true user experience of unity.

How to reshape the supply chain

For the millet TV This product, the product and the supply chain leader Daiqingsong is the vital role. Although Chuan's team has previously introduced hardware products such as the Millet box, the TV industry's water is certainly deeper. When the development of Millet TV was successful, taking a critical step from 0 to 1, Chuan needed an industry expert to help him achieve mass production of millet TV and complete the leap from 1 to 10000.

As early as 1999, Daiqingsong met Chuan when Skyworth was in charge of the Venus Project. Later, Chuan founded Lei, Daiqingsong also tried to cooperate with Chuan to develop a KTV TV. And when Lei investment chuan create more look, the development of E-book-related products, Daiqingsong become one of the many investors to see. However, Daiqingsong himself has been in the traditional television industry, as Skyworth Television business responsible for research and development of the deputy general Manager, Skyworth Cool TV CTO. Daiqingsong as Tcl China's research and development director, also led the team to develop Internet TV products.

Chuan also repeatedly invited Daiqingsong to join to see more, but Daiqingsong told Chuan, if do TV will join, otherwise avoid talking. With 2012 Lei and Chuan determined to develop smart TV, Daiqingsong finally became Chuan's colleague. Chuan inside once said, Daiqingsong is his hardest to dig.

Daiqingsong came to see more, the company does not have a full-time staff responsible for the supply chain, he needs to start from scratch to form a supply chain management system. But for Daiqingsong, this is an easy start.

"When you choose to rebuild this system, you will save all the things you've tried and done wrong, and do it in one step, which is the most efficient," he said. "Daiqingsong to the timeline," said just like Tesla to do electric cars, you will find it strong place is, simply did not take the old road of traditional industry-did a lot of trial and error finally try a right way, but in the analysis of the traditional industry situation, directly establish a completely different mode of success. ”

No matter suppliers, components suppliers, or suppliers from the factory, Millet TV is found by Samsung, Apple and other world-class manufacturers trained suppliers. Daiqingsong that the supply chain system of traditional TV brand is an internal system built up in the past. This means that they are not all very quality-oriented and do not have the experience and ability to compete directly with the world-class supplier market.

Daiqingsong has been able to understand the idea of smart TV and the use of Internet mode to make hardware when looking for suppliers for millet TVs. But the supply chain is not enough to tell the story, their real concern is a small company cross-industry to do the products such as television, whether to form a strong team, and develop a truly excellent products out.

Daiqingsong the way to solve the problem is simple. He put the development of Millet TV 1.1 points to the supplier, starting from the initial stage of the hand model, and then the circuit board, and then gradually developed the system UI run to them to see. Let suppliers experience the difference between the real function and the traditional TV and other smart TV. Coupled with his previous networking in the entire supply chain and the success of the millet handset, millet TV has been supported by top suppliers.

Who made the millet TV? People who really stay in front of the television

Millet TV software owner Li from the box on the valuable experience, it is how to mining user behavior data to determine the direction of product development. Initially, the Millet box only wanted to do a function-playing online video, but Li found that up to 80% of the users in the forum said that the need for "local playback" feature.

The development team realizes that local playback is not only an obvious function of word-of-mouth effect, but also the function of box users ' strong demand, so they try to develop and perfect the function of local playback. Local playback function on the box is very high, because the need to plug the mobile hard disk, u disk and other peripherals, but also involved in mobile storage device compatibility issues. On the other hand, users need to play a variety of video formats, which requires the box to support enough video format.

The development team invested a lot of manpower and material to improve the local playback function, but when the box users were more than 100,000 people, Li found that the proportion of users who used local playback function dropped sharply. This is because the early days of the Millet box users are a lot of computer players, they have strong demand for local playback is very normal. But when the product extends from the early core user circle to the mass circle, the behavior characteristic of the real target user group is not so.

"It makes sense to do data mining only when the user is forming a group size. According to the concept of Internet products, you serve a group of 1 million people, not equal to 1 million of the needs of the superposition. Li to the Economist, "to find this group demand, to find such a collection, just enough to meet the vast majority of people 80% of the demand, not to meet the needs of everyone." ”

This experience and millet box data mining, for the subsequent determination of Millet TV target user groups, played a very important role.

Millet TV Development team initially set up a number of target user groups, including the main user group should be millet mobile phone users, those 30-year-old young people. But the real data from the millet box show that such smart products are really young people buy, but the box's two main user groups are their (Yue) parents and children. According to the official data, the most popular program types in the Millet box are animation and Korean dramas, and the viewing time is quite a part of the day, and some boxes even play all day.

At the end of 2011, Chuan began to think about how television products were done. At that time, the media released a data, Beijing TV boot rate of less than 35%. Chuan and the Millet TV team began to think about which types of people were leaving the TV, and what type of users were left in front of the screen.

Like many smart-TV makers, Chuan initially wanted to pull back young people who had left the TV screen. But through market validation, Chuan feels it is not realistic to put young people accustomed to spending content on small screens back to television, or to focus on the people who stay in front of the TV screen. The new way of watching TV will gradually affect the families who do not watch TV. Therefore, the real target users of Millet TV are those who stay in front of the television. This directly determines that millet TV is not equipped with experience, voice control and other fashionable technology, because they are not perfect and easy to use, ordinary users are not convenient.

"Now the product confirms our judgment. The difference between us and others is that we first serve the people in front of the TV. Li Shing said, "We do not expect as long as their own TV, the former people do not watch TV watching TV." We should make the people who watch TV look better now. ”

The final development team set up five user models, including three typical users: preschool children, retired seniors and housewives, and these three groups were identified as the main users of Millet TV.

See details control from remote control

The development and completion of Millet TV, for Chuan individuals, enhanced as a hardware product manager confidence.

The minimalist style remote control is one of the most satisfying product designs for Chuan. The first generation of millet box with the remote control, or even now millet TV 11-key remote control is less than 2 buttons-volume button.

At the beginning, in the development of remote control, Millet box product owner Li Shing and Chuan quarreled for a long time. Li Shing that the volume key must be there, because this function is independent of the operating system. But in the design adhere to the minimalist chuan stubbornly refused the volume button, before that he had the traditional remote control the most commonly used channels to cut or subtract the key. His reasons are not unreasonable: because when one hand holds the remote control, the touch of the finger is not very wide, and all the keys are designed in this comfort zone. If you add a volume key, your finger needs to move up and down a wide range of movements, which can be cumbersome to manipulate.

After the noise, Chuan told Li Shing, "I'll give you so much space, you can prove you have the ability." If you can't do it, you'll find a way to solve it yourself.

Li Shing has considered the use of the upper and lower keys to adjust the volume, but considering such a design, will bring inconvenience to the third party application, so give up. Millet box remote control, the final can adjust the volume of the function to the TV remote control to solve. But in the Millet TV, this control can not be transferred, so now regardless of the millet box or the remote control of the millet TV, has increased 2 volume keys. Even so, last winter, in the TV remote control to increase the volume button, Chuan also repeatedly let Li Shing again think of ways to do subtraction.

In addition to the remote control of Apple TV, the two function keys of the Millet box remote control are counted as "menu" and "return", which adds a "home" button. The design of these three keys also conforms to the operational requirements of the Android system.

The industrial design of the Millet box and remote control is very useful for Apple TV. But Chuan and his engineers have developed a highly cost-effective product in a micro-innovative way. In the context of UI interaction, the Millet box completely created its own style.

In the product development aspect, Chuan Most loves to say two words: why must use other people's? Why not others? Especially in the code, design level development, he believes that by his own development team to do better, must not have ready-made solutions. This is fully embodied in the two-chip protocol and the user's UI at the bottom of the millet TV.

When the volume button appears in the Millet TV remote control, this time let the development team noisy, is whether need to add Bluetooth, body sense and voice control function in the remote control.

There is no doubt that if these hot technologies are assembled, the market space of millet TV can be enlarged further. For example, you can have more control to play games like "Crazy Birds". But these features can increase the cost of the remote control by nearly twice times. According to senior executives involved in the seminar, there was a heated debate in the boardroom about whether or not to add these features, and immediately after the argument on the way home, they would call and then fight.

Chuan the reason for the final negation is simple, these functions are not good enough. "All the interactive way I have studied, the reliable we use, the unreliable all does not need, does not do the gimmick." "Chuan said," I used the international brand the most high-end TV, the best body feeling control, buy when feel very good, buy back you will never use. ”

He once consulted a Microsoft executive on the Kinect's sense of manipulation, telling him that the technology was used in a special scenario. The Kinect itself generates bit error, but in the game the user only feels that he or she is not doing well, not the manipulation is inaccurate. However, when manipulating TV functions such as adjusting volume, the lack of precise manipulation can lead to a very bad user experience.

and voice control function, Chuan early in the founder of Lei Development KTV system has tried, the original recognition rate has reached more than 90%, but as long as the wrong recognition, the user experience is very bad, then will not be used. "They told me that those features would help me sell TV." Can users be satisfied with buying back? " Chuan asked, "I told them that when you saw the street, people were using their voice to manipulate the phone, which means it really worked." I'm definitely not a gimmick, I do what the user really uses. Because we don't care if you buy or not. ”

You can interpret these as Chuan enough respect for the user, on the other hand, you can also think that the millet business model determines that it must provide an excellent user experience. That is, the introduction of cost-effective products to attract a large number of users to buy, and then through accessories, applications and other value-added models to earn profits. Therefore, the product must be attractive enough, otherwise the value-added model can not be discussed.

"Our products do well and do not make money, in the words of Lei, ye, give a little tip." Chuan smiled and said, "Now the millet TV is not profit margin, the first product to do a good job, the amount of can talk about these." ”