Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, has unveiled a new one-stop e-commerce livestreaming solution to help global merchants of all sizes launch live, interactive channels to offer personalized online shopping experience. Livestreaming e-commerce solutions are quickly evolving as a response to the increasing demand during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Built upon Alibaba Cloud’s extensive content delivery networks (CDNs) with over 2,800 nodes in more than 70 countries and regions, the new solution leverages the cloud leader’s large-scale and distributed real-time video processing technology to ensure an uninterrupted signal transfer between sellers, buyers and the nearest distribution center.
Its proprietary cloud transcoding technology, Narrowband HD™, guarantees image quality while reducing bit rates, enabling a high-resolution livestreaming experience with low bandwidth costs. It helps address challenges surrounding the quality of audio and video, high cost of essential software such as real-time video transcoding and low efficiency in traffic management and CDNs. Users can enjoy livestreams with a latency of around two seconds, essential to the experience of flash sales.
Built on Alibaba Cloud’s immersive technology, the solution provides a rich range of essential features with minimal latency for virtual sales sessions, including livestream replays, product video showcases embedded into livestreaming windows and real-time subtitle translation for cross-border livestreams, among others. It also supports end-to-end and device-to-cloud livestreaming, making it easier for smaller merchants to launch their own sales sessions.
Starting from June 1, this year’s Tmall 618 Mid-Year Shopping Festival has seen a majority of merchants and brands using Alibaba Cloud’s livestreaming service. Sales generated from Taobao Live in just the opening hour of the event surpassed that of the entire first day in 2020.
The livestream solution was issued alongside over 20 other products, solutions and updates during today’s virtual Alibaba Cloud Summit 2021 to further help businesses on their digitalization journeys. Among the offerings, the seventh generation of Alibaba Cloud’s Elastic Compute Service (ECS 7) and an updated cloud-native Data Management Service (DMS) will debut in Asia followed by the rest of the global markets.
Jeff Zhang, President of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, commented during the summit: “As one of the leading providers and trusted partners in the global cloud market, technological innovation is at the heart of Alibaba Cloud’s long-term development. Introducing new products and solutions and continuously enhancing product features helps us deliver on our promise to our global customers and partners. The acceleration of the digital transformation agenda and adoption of emerging technologies is particularly encouraging in Asia, motivating us to constantly improve our innovative and R&D capabilities to stay at the forefront of the industry.”
Other new products and updates unveiled during the summit include:
Infrastructure product upgrades
Alibaba Cloud Linux 3 (Alinux3) cloud operating system (OS): an upgrade from Alinux2, the Alinux3 cloud OS, which is now available globally for the first time, delivers a better developer experience with improved security and greater stability and runtime performance. With Alinux3, runtime performance for mainstream end-to-end applications such as Redis, Mysql and Nginx has been improved by up to 40% compared with the previous generation. Alinux3 is compatible with Alibaba Cloud’s self-developed software ecosystem as well as RHEL/ CentOS 8. Starting from the launch, it also provides the developer community with eight consecutive years of free software maintenance and technical support.
ECS 7: introduced as part of Alibaba Cloud’s infrastructure upgrades, ECS 7 runs on Alinux3 and simultaneously supports trusted computing and confidential computing, a world-leading computing capability that is enhancing the level of security on the cloud. Powered by X-Dragon Architecture and third-generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors (Ice Lake), ECS 7 improves computing power by over 40% compared with its predecessor. Hong Kong and Singapore will be the first markets outside of mainland China to have access to ECS 7, beginning in the second half of 2021.
DMS: the one-stop cloud-native data management platform
Data silos are a challenge for many enterprises when it comes to data security, governance and mining, as core data assets are often stored in a variety of databases and warehouses. The DMS platform supports data management for over 30 data sources on hybrid cloud. This is possible because the gateways between the self-built and cloud databases have been integrated, seamlessly linking all databases and enabling full-cycle data management across production, storage, transmission, processing and computing.
The update will be available initially in Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore starting from later this year.
Other commercial releases of Alibaba Cloud database products include major MySQL version coverage for PolarDB , a new elastic mode for AnalyticDB, MyBase, ClickHouse and cloud-native multi-model database Lindorm, among others.
