The Elastos booth at ChinaJoy 2018 was a real success, not only for announcing our best in class technology on an international stage to over 100,000 visitors and the top tech companies in the world, but also for the unveiling of our newest hardware collaboration, the Elastos TV Box that utilizes the Elastos Carrier peer-to-peer network.

TV Box

The TV Box was co-produced by Elastos and its ecosystem strategic collaboration partner, Shanghai Shijiu TV. Shanghai Shijiu TV offers the world’s leading HTML5 and browser technology in the OTT and Smart TV field and is a partner of several top TV manufacturers such as Samsung, LG, Hisense and intellectual property carriers Disney, IQIYI, and Tencent Video. Shijiu TV is also the system provider for many OTT TV boxes.

Shijiu TV will promote and market Elastos Carrier as a new service that will accompany its large-scale production of TV Boxes that are already in existence. Along with featuring a video player like most TV boxes, now, with the help of Elastos Carrier, the box will build P2P connections between TV Boxes and mobile phones that will allow customers direct connection between devices and customer support. These features are the first to exist in applications in the OTT industry. Using Elastos Carrier to directly connect with other devices, without utilizing central servers, not only saves operation costs from the manufacturer but more importantly, protects user’s privacy.

Shijiu CTO, Yunlong Zhou, said, “By using the Elastos Carrier, we significantly reduced development and operation costs for this product. The Carrier feature will be fully deployed in all TV Box systems in the future. We estimate the volume of shipment could reach one million boxes in the next 6 months.”

A major milestone was also achieved during the expo when TI, an Elastos community member in South Africa, used his mobile phone to remotely connect to the TV Box at the Elastos booth. This remote testing of the Box marked a historical first step, signifying the successful integration of Elastos Carrier with a device that can be put into mass production. The TV Box, already being sold without the Carrier function, now, with the Elastos Carrier added, has projected sales for the next 5 months of 180k, 200k, 250k, 250k, and 250k units respectively, enabling a potential to finish the year with over 1 million Elastos Carrier nodes sold.

Elastos TV Box integrated with Elastos Carrier will add new features such as interacting with family and friends, personal cloud disc, and IPFS storage. These features will be integral in the Elastos Ecosystem and will allow users to finally own their device and own their data. The Box makes accessing data actually trustable and the interface is very user friendly. In the future, DApps will be able to be established on the same platform and an API will become open sourced to provide a good foundation for more social interactions.

For Our Community:

The Elastos Foundation will offer a live video stream meetup that will allow community members to test the Box with their mobile phones remotely, from anywhere in the world. More information will be released on this event.

Also, the Elastos TV Box will be used as the One Year Anniversary gift and as a community reward in the future.