"Lazy Bear Research Report" focuses on a certain segment of the domestic and foreign sports industry chain. Through interviews and surveys, it explores effective business models and future trends to help people inside and outside the sports industry better grasp investment and business opportunities. .
We are exploring various new ways of playing sports and technology, such as the drone racing called "Aerial F1".
Just this year, events under the banner of “drone racing” have gradually begun to come into public view. From the perspective of the competition format, this is basically a replica of a racing event in the air, except that the drone racing competition will have the requirement to cross obstacles, and its three-dimensional viewing experience will also fully release the sense of space utilization.
As one of the emerging technology categories, the drone industry is developing rapidly in China. According to the "2018 UAV Industry Status and Development Trend Report" released by the "Forward-looking Industry Research Institute", since 2015, Chinese drones have begun large-scale expansion in various fields. By 2017, China's drone market had reached 12.13 billion yuan, of which civilian drones were about 6.73 billion yuan. The report predicts that the market size of civilian drones is expected to reach 96.8 billion yuan by 2023.
But like the robot industry, the research and development of the drone industry will focus more on practical life applications, including but not limited to electricity, security, agriculture, forestry, aerial photography, etc. In the field of entertainment consumption, the application market of drones is still relatively blank. This also brings opportunities for drone racing events.
Similar to the e-sports competitions and robot fighting events that Lanxiong Sports has paid attention to before, drone racing events are classified in the electronic sports field by the industry. Although it is still unclear whether this event will become one of the mainstream events in the future, as an emerging thing, its fresh viewing experience, reconstruction of the definition of sports, and future imagination space are enough to surprise people.
The aristocratic sport of "Western learning spreading to the east"
Similar to F1, drone racing was also a product of the West.
In the summer of 2014, a group of enthusiasts in California, USA formed a small team called FPV Explorers Racers and agreed to tinker with racing drones every weekend. They are believed to be the first publicly established racing drone club. Also in the fall of that year, several Frenchmen posted videos of themselves flying racing drones in the forest on the Internet, which became popular and the sport began to spread in Europe.
Soon, various drone racing events began to appear. In July 2015, Scot Refsland held the first national drone racing event "Drone Nationals" in Sacramento, California. . Since then, institutions or organizations such as MOTI GP and Drone Sports Association (DSA) have successively held similar drone competitions, accelerating the development of this event in the United States.
Today, the most well-known drone racing events in the world are the Drone Racing League (DRL) in the United States and the Drone Champions League (DCL) in Europe, both of which were launched in 2016.
Nick Horbacheski, founder of the Drone Racing League
Their current development momentum looks good. In June last year, DRL received US$20 million in Series B financing from investors including SKY (British Sky Television), the American media giant Liberty Media that acquired F1, and Allianz Insurance Group . NFL Miami Dolphins owner Stephen Ross is also an investor in DRL. DCL has not fallen behind. According to the latest official public data, they have reached cooperation with more than 30 TV stations around the world, broadcasting events in 76 overseas countries, covering a population of 400 million, and the average number of viewers per game in 2017 exceeded 130 million.
From the perspective of equipment, the drones that appear in racing arenas, also known as "traversing machines", are small drones with high speed and short endurance, and their top speed can reach 200km/h. In the competition field, in addition to the body of the traversing machine, players also need to be equipped with professional control equipment and monitors to control the drone freely.
The cost of building an ordinary traversing machine is not expensive.On Taobao, a basic time-travel machine generally sells for about 1,000 yuan, including a controller, a display and a body. Coupled with chargers and other peripheral consumables, for 3,000 yuan, you can call yourself a drone racing player.
But this is not a sport that ordinary people can play for a long time. Wang Jinzheng, captain of the Sonic Boom Team of the Domestic Drone Club, told Lanxiong Sports that the drones used by professional pilots need to be assembled and repaired by themselves. The biggest expense in this sport is the loss of equipment. In his words, if you fly normally, the consumption of the propeller alone will be hundreds every day. He roughly estimated that the loss of various types of equipment in a month is about 6,000 yuan, which is 70,000 to 80,000 yuan a year. From this perspective, drone racing, like F1, is also an “aristocratic sport”.
Drone used in GP Nanjing
Because it is an aristocratic sport, in addition to North America and Europe where the event originated, this sport is also very popular in the Middle East. In early 2016, Emirates Airlines held a drone racing competition in Dubai with a prize of several million US dollars. This was the first time that the prize money of a drone racing event exceeded one million. According to foreign media reports, nearly 10 million US dollars were invested in this game, but there was no commercial return. People have to lament that the rich are still rich after all.
Chinese players are also here
In China, drone racing events are also starting to take off.
At the beginning of this year, Beijing Mingxin Aviation Technology Co., Ltd. reached a cooperation with the DCL Alliance to bring this event to China. Guangzhou Siyide Culture Co., Ltd. is responsible for the promotion and operation. At the same time, DCL also sold the exclusive broadcast rights of the new media to Tencent Sports, which will broadcast the entire 2018-2020 season.
In Europe, DCL will choose city landmarks to host events, such as the Champs Elysées in Paris, the 100-meter underground salt mine in Turda, and the Congress Square in Vaduz. Their first stop in China was the Great Wall Theater in Gubei Water Town, located on the outskirts of Beijing and at the foot of the Simatai Great Wall. According to data released by CYTS, Gubei Water Town received a total of 2.7536 million tourists in 2017.
There are a total of 9 participating clubs, 3 of which are from China. In addition to the Chinese Dragon Club, which has a fixed quota for the DCL, the other two clubs, Sonic Boom and Unicorn, have qualified for this station by participating in the first-ever China station wild card competition. Binding
with scenic spots is a smarter aspect of DCL. Gubei Water Town welcomed their arrival. Not only did they put up event billboards in the entrance hall, they also set up a separate ticket window for the event. The tourists also learned that there was a drone racing event in the scenic area that night.
DCL Beijing Station is held at the Great Wall Theater in Gubei Water Town.
Ticket prices for this game are divided into three categories: 80 yuan, 280 yuan and 980 yuan. There will be discounts when bundled with scenic spot tickets. It was the peak tourist season in early August, and the attendance rate at the Great Wall Theater that day was pretty good, with hundreds of spectators watching.
is full of curiosity about this sport, which is probably the main reason for attracting spectators to watch the game. Several spectators said that in fact they did not understand the details of the game, but they just found it refreshing to watch the shiny drones soaring in the sky.
In addition to DCL, there are two drone racing events in China: Drone GP and X-Fly. The former belongs to Shanghai Jisu Sports Culture Media Co., Ltd., and its founder and CEO Wang Qing has previously served as a senior executive in Baidu TV, iQiyi and other companies; the latter belongs to Shanghai Gesu Electronic Technology Co., Ltd., and its founder and CEO Chen Cheng is from the United States. Ohio State University, where she is an honors double major in physics and mathematics.
Currently, Drone GP has held three large-scale drone racing events. Among them, the event held in Nanjing in May this year received the title support of JD.com. Next, Wang Qing plans to launch the New Year’s Drone GP league within this year to further expand the influence of drone racing in Asia.
Wang Qing revealed that they have reached a cooperation with Sina Sports in the new season, and the latter has become their media partner.In addition, overseas media such as FOX Sports Asia, Eleven Sports Network, OSN, and Starhub will also broadcast their events.
X-Fly has already held 6 games in the 2017 season, with players from more than 20 countries and regions participating, and the sponsorship income from a single game exceeded 500,000. Through the home page resources obtained through cooperation with platforms such as Youku and LeTV, the average online audience for each game exceeds 10,000. This year, they will hold four events in three scenic spots: the Great Wall in Beijing, Guanshan Grassland in Shaanxi, and Fuchun River in Zhejiang. They will return to Shanghai to hold the finals in December. Among them, the first two stops have already been held.
According to Lanxiong Sports, the current domestic players in drone racing are between 15 and 35 years old. They are mainly male, have higher education, love sports, and are full of interest in technological things. They also have A certain amount of spending power.
Compared with the main users of traditional sports events, this group of people is younger and thus more receptive to new things. Compared with e-sports users, this group of people will have a higher income level, so their purchasing power will be stronger.
At this year’s Jakarta Asian Games, e-sports appeared in a major event for the first time as a sport. The Chinese team won two gold medals and one silver. Prior to this, Huo Qigang, chairman of the Asian Electronic Sports Federation, once stated that e-sports is only a small part of e-sports. "We also hope to include drones, artificial intelligence and robots into our federation. This is a long-term goal." The goal". From the business model level,
refers to the path of traditional sports, even e-sports, robot fighting and other industries. Drone racing can also incubate IP through events, cover costs through sales from sponsors and broadcast platforms, and in the future, through offline education and product retail and other channels to seek monetization, including offline experience stores, etc. Of course, this is all for later.
Challenges and Opportunities
The birth of a new thing will always face various challenges. Lanxiong Sports' investigation found that in addition to the fact that the industry-recognized competition format and rules have not yet been formed, there are still many problems that need to be solved in the drone racing event itself based solely on the audience's viewing experience. The biggest problem with
is that the effective viewing time of the game is insufficient. Limited by battery life, current racing drones can only fly at high speed for 10 minutes, which means they can fly 2-3 laps on the field. The equipment debugging before the game takes a long time. This results in the audience often having to wait a long time for the live drone to take off, and they have to wait again after just a few minutes. If the effective viewing time is too short, the audience will feel idle and it will be more difficult to retain the audience sitting in front of the screen.
Secondly, drone racing requires very high operational skills from the players, and it is easy for the aircraft to crash. Due to the limitations of the track layout, there are not many drones that can take off at the same time in a race. Therefore, if there are too many drones, the audience can only watch one or two drones fly over the finish line, which is relatively boring. .
has another question about rebroadcasting. Currently, the image transmission signals used by players in drone competitions are analog signals. The advantage is that they are timely enough, but the problem is that the images are not clear enough and intermittent. If it is changed to a digital signal with clearer image transmission, a delay of several seconds will occur, which will have a great impact on the player's control. Therefore, how to provide clear first-person drone footage during broadcasts is also a problem that the industry needs to overcome.
Drone players have very high requirements for the real-time quality of images, and would rather sacrifice part of the clarity for this purpose.
In addition, the approval of the competition venue is also an issue that cannot be ignored. DCL founder and CEO Herbert Weirather told Lanxiong Sports that the most difficult thing about hosting games in China is dealing with the government, which requires various approvals.
The State Council and the Air Traffic Control Committee of the Central Military Commission drafted an "Interim Regulation on the Management of Unmanned Aircraft Flights" at the beginning of this year, which clearly stipulates the flight airspace of light drones. As for the classification of small UAVs to which racing UAVs belong, you only need to submit materials and file a flight plan, and you can fly in the airspace specified by light UAVs.
The airspace for light drones stipulated by the state is actually relatively loose.
Although from the perspective of regulations, there are still many venues for drone racing events, some local governments will, for security reasons, There are concerns about drone racing events, which poses a great test to the resource breakthrough capabilities of event organizers.
The same problem will also be involved in the daily training of players. After all, it is difficult to find an open space in the city center nowadays, not to mention whether there will be security interference.
Of course, every new thing cannot be perfect. Moreover, whether it is technical difficulties or competition performance challenges, there may not be no solution. After all, the entire drone industry is developing rapidly.
Interestingly, the industry is also exploring other ways to compete with drones. Chen Cheng feels that racing may not be a good way to show the charm of drone competition. He is planning to produce some drone-themed entertainment programs and present them to the audience in the form of reality shows. Of course, this may mean greater investment costs.
In the long run, from the perspective of competitions, there is still a lot of room for imagination using drones as the carrier. Maybe in the near future, we will be able to see drone fighting competitions.
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