On Friday, October 15, VK (until recently – Mail.ru Group) launched its own video platform, the correspondent of RBC reports.
According to the head of the VK social network VKontakte, Marina Krasnova, the daily audience of the platform is more than 40 million people, this figure was achieved by combining the video resources of VKontakte, Odnoklassniki and other VK products. For comparison: the daily audience of YouTube (owned by Google) in Russia, according to MediaScope, is 31.9 million people over 12 years old.
Technical Director of VKontakte and VK Video Alexander Tobol stressed that the new service will combine various video formats, viewing will be possible on any device and screen. Users will have access to automatic subtitles based on speech recognition technology, a geo-distributed content delivery network (CDN), thanks to which video and live broadcasts start on average one and a half times faster, regardless of distance, and other technologies.
The company also presented a new VKontakte video display case for the web version and mobile application. The company says it is based on a unified video recommendation platform built on machine learning algorithms that can analyze content in a frame. VK intends to increase the number of videos of its own production: reality shows, TV series, as well as various vertical videos.
At the end of 2019, VK CEO Boris Dobrodeyev spoke in an interview with RBC about plans to launch a single video service for the group's companies, which will select content based on the user's personal preferences in the same way as YouTube does. At the same time, Dobrodeyev emphasized that it would not be “frontal” YouTube, but a service “in its own way”. He explained that all digital media and platforms will soon be competing for time spent – the time a person spends with them. “We will set ourselves the task of increasing the time spent more, catching up with YouTube, increasing the amount of content consumed outside the social graph,” Dobrodeev said. Until now, the company has developed the Cinema Mail.ru service, where it is possible to watch videos, read news about the world of cinema, and buy tickets to cinemas.
