The Evolving Strategy Of A Peer-to-peer Streaming Company

In recently years, while peer-to-peer applications such as file download (e.g. Gnutella, emule, Bittorrent) and voice over-IP (e.g. Skype) have gained tremendous popularity. Due to the maturity of the video encoding/decoding technology, digital compression technology and the growth of the Internet bandwidth and the developing of the new transferring technology, streaming media has gained quickly developed. The peer-to-peer streaming media is combined the mature streaming media and peer-to-peer transferring technology.The S company is among several companies which have successfully developed peer-to-peer streaming media technology. It has focused on the technology developing, and has attracted some users and become a technology provider. The situation of S company faced is whether and how to change to peer-to-peer streaming media operator. Facing to the fierce market competition, the company needs a overall evolving plan.Firstly, the thesis introduce the S company background as well as peer-to-peer streaming media technology characteristic, then employ PEST and 5 forces model to analysis macro environment, deduce the industry success factors is technology, user, contents, and business model.The Disruptive Innovation Theory which advanced by internationally renowned innovation expert Clayton Christensen in Harvard university of business school refers to how new entrants to an industry can use relatively simple, convenient, low-cost innovations to create growth and triumph over powerful incumbents. The Disruptive innovation can be of two types: one) low end disruptions which deliver a low priced alternative to customers who are overshot by existing offerings or two) new-market disruptions, which create new growth by making it easier to for people to do something that historically required deep expertise or wealth. This theory provides new ideas of evolving path to the manager of the new entrants.The thesis analyzes and determines the target market of the S company guided with the Disruptive Innovation Theory, points out that the S company should build new market based on non-consumer by offering attractive content type.Based on the analysis of S company characteristic, its evolving path has three key stages including starting, climbing, maturing, and every stage has its trait, this thesis also indicates the profit time of the company through analyzing the curve of cash flow.This thesis comes up with some practical suggestion on the evolving path of the S company is: Starting with new market faced to non-consumers, building company's user base, making the user base up to key scale utilizing the positive network effect, introducing business model to build the profiting base, extending to other value network to service wide range user. The S company finally becomes a full service operator.