LeEco calls out Xiaomi’s claims of having the largest video library in China

NEW DELHI: LeEco, an aggressive new entrant in the Indian smartphone space, has called out Xiaomi’s claims of having the largest video library in China, saying its rival’s content is sourced from third parties, while LeEco has its own. Xiaomi has said it has data to prove that it has a larger content library than that of its rival.

Both companies, cutthroat rivals in China and now in India, are betting on content as a key differentiator for their devices in an intensely competitive Indian market and are also investing to build up local Indian content.

“All the content they (Xiaomi) have is from third-party, meaning their strategic partner Youku... The experience is not vertically integrated, it’s just a place holder, a rack, it’s not curated,” said Brian Hui, senior V-P of Lemall International, the ecommerce arm of LeEco.


Xiaomi though has always maintained that it has the largest video library in China, its home market and the largest smartphone market in the world, where it competes with LeEco in the mobile phone, television and content space.

“Our model in China is content aggregation where we work with content providers directly and we’ve actually managed to build the largest video content library in China, without a doubt,” Hugo Barra, head of international operations at Xiaomi, had previously told ET.

“They (LeEco) claim a lot of things, I can provide you details on that. We do have the largest video content library in China without a doubt.”

Both companies consider India, the world’s fastest growing, an extremely important and strategic market to their global operations, with retail expansion and content at the centre of its future strategy.

Atul Jain, chief operating officer of LeEco’s smartphone business in India, in fact is hoping the company gets to open its own retail outlets in the country without any sourcing requirement for two-to-three years, in line with what is being reportedly considered by the government for Apple.

For local content, LeEco has tied up with YuppTV and production house Eros to source and integrate live television and entertainment shows. It has also invested $10 million for setting up content delivery networks (CDN) in key cities in India for seamless content viewing. Xiaomi has invested in Hungama-.com to get entertainment content integrated with its smartphones.

LeEco’s Hui, who also heads the North American operations, said the company had an upper hand on Xiaomi since it had technological capability to integrate content on devices, which offered better enduser experience. The company has launched smartphones and will launch televisions in July.

“That’s why we use LeEco to subsidise the hardware... customers pay us for the service and experience,” he said, referring to the company selling phones at less than the build cost and its content subscription model in China, which it wants to apply in India in due course.