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Image source: China Visual

BEIJING, August 11 (TMTPOST) -- China"s short video platform Kuaishou has released the video cloud brand "StreamLake", which provides audio, video, and AI services, officially entering the cloud area.

While releasing the cloud brand, Yu Bing, senior vice president of Kuaishou and head of Streamlake business, announced on Wednesday that the company has developed a cloud-based intelligent video processing SoC chip for live video-on-demand applications. This chip is still in the small-scale verification and testing stage, not yet in mass production.

China"s cloud computing market has entered the era of all-out competition and therefore increment gained from the traditional business and existing customers is not enough. Therefore, the cloud vendors are improving their abilities in chip development, SaaS ecological construction, and market expansion.

Tencent announced the progress of three self-developed chips in late 2021, mainly for video processing and other scenarios. Prior to that, Alibaba and Baidu had already started their research and development in chip-making.

StreamLake, the video cloud brand of Kuaishou, is similar to the development path of Vigo Video of Tictok owner ByteDance. StreamLake"s underlying layer came from Kuaishou"s backend and adopted the experience accumulated from the company"s live broadcast and other businesses.

StreamLake products have not yet included storage, network and other IaaS services (Infrastructure as a Service). Wang Zhongyuan, vice president of technology and head of AI technology and technical director at Kuaishou, said StreamLake would focus on costs, efficiency and profits, "and therefore will not invest heavily in infrastructure construction"

According to a report released by market research firm IDC, throughout the year 2021, major players adopted different approaches to the video cloud usage of key customers. Due to profitability pressure, some integrated video platforms used technical and commercial means to reduce their expenditure in bandwidth and cloud computing resources rental, while short video platforms and interactive entertainment live platforms were still increasing video cloud usage.

StreamLake"s target customers are companies that rely most on video in the broadcasting and communications industries. In addition to supporting Kuaishou"s products, StreamLake"s current external customers include Zhihu, China Unicom, Central Video, and Xiaomi.