Panda TV

» see panda.tv as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

China's live-streaming boom happened behind a wall. It had its own platforms and its own economics, and almost none of it reached me in Ankara. I knew the category from Twitch, and the Chinese version of it was larger and ran on money that had very little to do with advertising.

Panda TV came out of Shanghai and opened to the public on 21 September 2015, six days later than the date it had announced. Wang Sicong put his name on it that month on Weibo and made himself chief executive. He is the son of Wang Jianlin, who built Dalian Wanda into one of the largest property companies in China, and by 2015 he was already a fixture of the Chinese internet on his own account as the owner of the esports team Invictus Gaming.

The pitch was Twitch for China, and the market was crowded before Panda got to it. Douyu and Huya had a head start and Tencent standing behind them. What Panda had instead was a famous name and a willingness to outbid everybody for talent. Signing streamers away from competitors was the whole strategy, and for a while it worked, because in that market the audience followed the person rather than the site.

By May 2017 the company was claiming eighty million monthly users and had taken in something like $250 million of funding. That was also the month the last investment arrived. Nothing came after it for twenty two months.

None of this was reachable from where I sat, and that is a fair description of Panda TV's entire life rather than a complaint about mine. Chinese platforms of that period were built for a domestic audience and did not much care whether anyone outside could get in. It was enormous and three and a half years old at the end, and outside China almost nobody noticed it existed until the reports of the collapse.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the money ~

The two costs that ended it were the two costs the business could not avoid. Live video at that scale is bandwidth, paid by the terabyte to Chinese carriers, and Panda owed around 700 million yuan of it. The streamers were on guaranteed contracts written during the bidding war, and roughly 300 million yuan of those payments went unmade.

A billion yuan is not a fatal number for a company that can raise. Panda could not. The Chinese live-streaming market consolidated hard through 2018 around the two Tencent-backed platforms, and an investor looking at a third-place site burning cash on video delivery had better places to put it. Wang sold out of his own company at some point in 2018.

~ the actual end ~

The user numbers had already told the story. Eighty million monthly by the May 2017 claim, sixteen point eight million by January 2019. That is most of an audience gone in twenty months, and audiences in that market left the way they had arrived, following whichever streamer had signed somewhere else.

Chief executive Zhang Juyuan confirmed the closure in March 2019 in an internal letter citing cash flow. The servers went off on 18 March. The letter said the company had run out of money, which by that point was the only remaining fact about it.

~ what got buried with it ~

The founder's part of the story ran on longer than the company's. Prometheus Capital, Wang's fund, had given a joint guarantee to Panda's investors, which left it around 2 billion yuan in the hole. A Beijing court put spending restrictions on him and at one point listed one of his companies on the public register of dishonest debtors. A settlement with the investors was reported in December 2019, and his mother reportedly covered 100 million yuan of it after his father declined to.

What Panda demonstrated is that you can buy an audience in a live-streaming market and you cannot keep one. Everything it spent went on people who were free to walk, delivered over infrastructure it had to rent by the gigabyte. Tencent's platforms absorbed what was left. The lasting contribution was an exact figure for how expensive second place had been.

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