Brief introduction:In February 2021, the “New Content and New Interaction” Global Video Cloud Innovation Challenge kicked off. This competition is jointly sponsored by Intel Ali Cloud, and Youku strategic technical cooperation, Tianchi platform and Ali Cloud video cloud team jointly undertook. Since its inception, the competition has attracted more than 4600 contestants from all over the world to sign up for the competition. We selected excellent cases and touching stories from the contestants to walk into the world of video cloud entrepreneurship and innovators together.

Old and New ‘Reaction Video’

A “Reaction Video” is a Video that records people’s reactions to an event. In the form of expression, the picture consists of two parts, including the video resources watched and the viewer’s own reaction.

The video format has its roots in Japanese variety shows from the 1970s. The small screen format is called a “ワイプ”, while a “wipe” is used to show the faces and reactions of the contestants. Now many Japanese variety shows still retain this way of performance, this “small window guests immediate reaction” has also become a major feature of Japanese variety shows.

Screenshot from Japanese Variety Show “The Night of the Moon”

Reaction in 2013, “video” from TV to the Internet, along with the TV drama “the game of rights” in the third quarter, hit a lot of tubing recorded when watching drama by the reaction, the collective resonate, led to a global audience reaction “video” from this global phenomenon, and became mature in more than one video platform development and large branch. Reaction, the most popular channel on YouTube, has racked up 11 billion views and 20.1 million subscribers.

With the explosion of global popularity, “reaction video” began to take root in the domestic video platform, and showed a trend of “localization”. At present, website B is the platform with the largest number of Reaction content in China, among which “mosquito ji” was one of the earliest UP users to make Reaction videos. Since January 2018, it has posted its first video, with a total of 548,000 followers so far.

Image taken from Bilibili

“Reaction video”, exists is reasonable

While “reaction video” has exploded in popularity, some people are beginning to question whether this form of video is really valuable. Will it be just a flash in the pan supported by hot spots?

On this point, let’s take a look at the development history of video platforms. In the early days, video platforms only provided the function of text comments. After watching a video, the audience could leave a comment below the video.

Behind the comments and the barrage, there is a need for recognition and a desire to share. In the foreseeable future, with the popularity of video cloud technology, “reaction video”, a more vivid form of interaction is bound to be widely used. While watching a video, the audience can record their immediate reaction in real time, perhaps becoming a new track.

“Reaction video”, how to use video cloud technology to achieve?

In this Global Video Cloud Innovation Challenge, some contestants have noticed this interesting form of interaction. Liu Shaorong, a novice programmer, enjoys watching reaction videos in his spare time. He found that it is not easy to produce a reaction video, as it takes a lot of time to edit and produce. For viewers, a reaction video can only show the reactions of one or several people. So he decided to take the “reactive video” approach and create a different video app.

Liu Shaorong’s video app, called “Watching Video Together”, allows viewers to invite friends to watch entertaining videos, live races or press conferences in the Shaorong room to share their feelings. In terms of technology selection, Liu Shaorong chose to develop on the basis of Intel Xeon SG1 GPU by using Aliyun on demand to manage video resources and users to upload videos, and to guarantee real-time and stable calls of users through Aliyun audio and video communication service. For the function of automatically generating reaction Video, the hardware acceleration of Video was implemented on SG1 machine using Intel Media SDK and Intel Quick Sync Video.

In addition to friends, the site allows users to interact with people they have never met but who share similar interests. To take care of shy users who don’t want to show their faces, Liu ShaoRong uses WebGL + DeepLearning to generate AR Face and combines it with Aliyun audio and video technology to add fun to users’ chats.

On the future of “Watch Video Together”, Liu Shaorong said: “In the future, I hope to bring users a stronger sense of identity and desire to share. More video cloud technology will be used to quickly enrich the website’s functions, providing beauty, voice change, AR Face and other ways of playing, to increase the interest of the video and improve user loyalty.”

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