Global monopoly of technology

Determined the development schedule for the first half of the year, Luo Sheng assembled 150 internal employees to form a development team, led by Xu Yong personally to assist, Luo Sheng himself also entered the development sequence.

At the same time, the company is also hiring various engineers with high salaries.

In the next half month, Xu Yong is responsible for the development of Bluestar Music (MusicSpace), and Luo Sheng is responsible for the development of Bluestar Video (BluestarVideo), but he will not keep his head in the technical department for development work. The main purpose is Building up the framework is more important to cultivating the development capabilities of engineers.

The difference between Bluestar Video and Fangfeng Yingyin is first of all technically different. Fangfeng Yingyin is not an online player and does not use streaming media technology.

The so-called streaming media technology is a network transmission technology that compresses the complete video and audio data and saves it on the website server. Users can download the information while downloading, so there is no need to download the entire compressed file and then watch it.

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"As early as the end of the last century, IT giants including Microsoft and Apple saw the potential contained in streaming media technology and developed their own products. The IETF and many streaming media technology companies began to formulate relevant Technical specifications, hoping to make the products of many manufacturers compatible with each other, and jointly expand the market."

At this moment, Luo Sheng and the members of the development team began to exchange technology while sitting together in the lounge. For the members of the development team, Luo Sheng is definitely the god of technology in their minds, not only can expand their horizons, but also learn the key. Many new things can definitely kill university computer professors.

"In April 1998, the IETF Multimedia Group released the first standardized streaming media communication protocol RTSP1.0, which marked the development of streaming media technology has entered a standardized track. In addition to Microsoft and Adobe, other vendors such as Apple, RealNetworks, PacketVideo, etc. all support the RTSP1.0 protocol in their products."

Speaking of this, Luo Sheng raised Erlang’s legs, and Yun Danfeng lightly said: “However, our Bluestar Video does not use the services of any streaming media technology company currently on the market because their technology is too inferior. We develop new ones ourselves. The streaming media transmission protocol is not for external sale, only for our own products."

Lu Siming said: "Boss, do you mean that our streaming media technology does not support the RTSP1.0 protocol?"

Luo Sheng nodded: "What I want to build is my own ecosystem, Bluestar Technology's "Family Bucket". It was not because of arrogance and lack of money that I chose not to follow the RTSP1.0 protocol, because the standard makers fundamental There is no sufficient prediction of the rapid growth of Internet broadband, and due to the shortage of IPv4 addresses, there will be a large number of proxy servers.

"In addition, there are certain shortcomings in transmission reliability and ease of use. I firmly believe that the next few years must be the years of the Internet video explosion. I don’t use the RTSP1.0 protocol. Others want to make streaming video. The service provider’s company won’t have much interest either, but I’ve seen it farther than they reacted earlier.”

The development team of Bluestar Video currently develops a streaming media technology called "LvHTTP", which uses an instant messaging protocol embedded in video.

The development of Internet technology has a major feature of "winner takes all". In the application layer protocol, HTTP has the potential of winner-takes-all. This is not Luo Sheng’s technology. Its founder is Tim Bay, the father of the World Wide Web. A masterpiece by Nas Lee.

The HTTP protocol was originally designed as a web browsing application based on the BS architecture. It is characterized by its simplicity and ease of use. Now the industry believes that the protocol is not suitable for use in applications that require high real-time performance such as streaming media, and will cause additional communication in the process The load is heavy.

However, Luo Sheng's Lv has obviously overturned this point. Currently Lv has been developed. In most cases, Lv applications use HTTP as the bearer during internal testing. This ensures that they can be used directly in most networks without complexity. Configuration and debugging.

This is not to blame for others, Luo Sheng's vision has surpassed this era for decades after all.

The current broadband speed is generally around 1M, but Luo knows that IP network broadband will increase rapidly in the future, and it is a matter of recent years. If the current broadband speed is compared to a 10 cm diameter water pipe, then a few years later The diameter of the water pipe will expand by one meter or even ten meters. Under this trend, the additional communication load caused by HTTP is no longer important. On the contrary, it will show more and more obvious advantages in terms of ease of use. Has become the de facto standard.

Naturally, the RTSP1.0 protocol will not be chosen.

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In the following days, Luo Sheng led the team to continue to develop, create a unique online technology LD recombination compression algorithm for Bluestar Video, and apply for a patent.

LD technology can ensure that users can watch 720P high-definition video smoothly at broadband speeds within 1M. At this time in early 2004, it was definitely the world's leading streaming media playback technology.

Taking China as an example, the current Internet users mainly use 512K~1M broadband. The ability to watch high-definition videos online with limited broadband resources is what users expect and is the core competitiveness of Bluestar Video.

Luo Sheng attaches great importance to the problem of online video playback card failure, because this is also a problem that users care about, in a word, user experience.

Obviously, for the smoothness of online video playback, it is necessary to clarify the concept of bit rate, that is, the larger the bit rate Kbps, the larger the video file. If the bit rate is too large and the broadband speed cannot keep up, the video will freeze. , Even stuck into a dog.

The highlight of the recombination compression algorithm of LD technology is that the image quality is the best in the industry when the bit rate is the same, and the bit rate is the lowest in the industry when the image quality is the same.

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At the end of February, Luo Sheng was busy with development here. Reddit.com in North America was launched as scheduled. The website itself positioned itself as a social news site. The slogan of the launch was: Voice in advance, voice from the Internet.

Reddit, which was born in Luo Sheng's hands, has at least one superb change from the previous Reddit, which is to change its simple pages, rough graphics, large texts, etc., and the web page layout is beautiful and smooth.

The reason why the Reddit of the previous life fell off was also due to the funding. After all, the bandwidth cost will increase accordingly. Fortunately, Bluestar Technology is not bad for money, although it has not yet earned a penny.

Isn't this money from VC?

When Reddit was launched, product owner Russell Simmons asked the international version of BlueSpace to help Reddit drain traffic, but was rejected by his boss George Charles.

Because Luo Sheng explained to George, even warned that if he dared to pop up a small advertisement window on the international version of BlueSpace website without his permission, he would be fired, even if it was a small advertisement.

George is very happy about his current job. Last year he completed his performance and his salary was raised to 1.08 million US dollars as he wished. He also got the option to share shares of Bluestar Technology, which will be exercised at the valuation price after the B round of financing. Let him realize that in the near future, Bluestar Technology's IPO can become a billionaire.

Up to now, the international version of the BlueSpace website has reached the 20 million mark in North America. Basically, universities in the United States have been successfully captured. George Charles has successfully replicated in North America based on the expansion model of China.

Now starting to expand to users outside of universities, the rate of expansion of the BlueSpace website in North America can be said to be unmatched.

Facts have proved that this model has been proved to be successful in China, and it can also be successful in North America, and vice versa.

There is even an illusion that BlueSpace seems to be more suitable and more potential in Europe and America.

With 20 million users, this is a very large amount of traffic, but it can't be drained, which makes Russell Simmons very depressed.

However, Bluestar Technology is currently very well-known at home and abroad. The launch of Reddit.com has also attracted the attention of Internet circles at home and abroad, as well as VCs that invest in Bluestar Technology.

At first glance, the industry and VCs were stunned.

As the pioneer of real-name social networking and the most slippery Internet company, the characteristics of the anonymity mechanism of the newly launched product contrast sharply with its core business.

Is this all playing snakeskin?

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