The development schedule for the first half of the year was determined, and Luo Sheng convened 150 internal employees to form a development team, which was assisted by Xu Yong himself, and Luo Sheng himself entered the development sequence.

At the same time, the company is also hiring all kinds of engineers with high salaries.

In the next half month, Xu Yong was responsible for the development of BlueStar Music (MusicSpace), and Luo Sheng was responsible for the development of Bluestar Video (BluestarVideo), but he will not always be immersed in the development work of the technical department, the main purpose is to build the framework, and more to cultivate the development ability of engineers.

The difference between Bluestar video and exposure video and audio, first of all, there is a difference in technology, exposure video and audio is not an online player, and it does not use streaming media technology.

The so-called streaming media technology is a network transmission technology that compresses the complete image and sound data and saves it on a website server, so that users can obtain information while downloading, so that there is no need to download the entire compressed file and then watch it.

……

"As early as the end of the last century, IT giants including Microsoft and Apple saw the potential of streaming media technology and developed their own products.

At this moment, Luo Sheng and the members of the development team began to exchange technology when they sat together in the lounge, for the members of the development team, Luo Sheng is definitely the technology god in their minds, not only can expand their horizons, but also learn a lot of new things, and they can definitely kill the computer professor of the university in seconds.

"In April 1998, the multimedia group of the IETF released the first standardized streaming media communication protocol RTSP 1.0, which marked the development of streaming media technology into the standardized track, in addition to Microsoft and Adobe, other manufacturers such as Apple, RealNetworks, PacketVideo, etc., have supported the RTSP 1.0 protocol in their products."

Speaking of this, Luo Sheng cocked Erlang's legs, and said lightly: "However, our Bluestar Video does not use the services of any streaming technology company on the market now, because their technology is too inferior, we develop new streaming media transmission protocols by ourselves, and do not sell them to the outside world, only for our own products." ”

Lu Siming said: "Boss, do you mean that our streaming media technology does not support the RTSP 1.0 protocol? ”

Luo Sheng nodded: "What I want to build is my own ecosystem, Bluestar Technology's 'family bucket', not because of arrogance and lack of money, I chose not to take the RTSP1.0 protocol, but because the formulators of the standard did not fully predict the rapid growth of Internet broadband, as well as the shortage of IPv4 addresses, as well as the existence of a large number of proxy servers." ”

"In addition, there are certain shortcomings in both transmission reliability and ease of use. I firmly believe that the next few years will definitely be the years of the explosion of online video, I don't use the RTSP 1.0 protocol, and other companies that want to be streaming video service providers will not be much interested, but I see it far earlier than they reacted. ”

Bluestar Video's development team is currently developing a streaming media technology called "LvHTTP", which uses an instant messaging protocol embedded in video.

The development of Internet technology, there is a great feature is "winner takes all", in the application layer protocol, HTTP has the potential of winner takes all, this is not Luo Sheng's technology, its founder is the masterpiece of Tim Beners, the father of the World Wide Web www.

Originally designed as a B/S architecture for web browsing applications, the HTTP protocol is characterized by its simplicity and ease of use, but now the industry believes that the protocol is not suitable for use in applications with high real-time requirements, such as streaming media, and will cause additional load in the communication process.

However, Luo Sheng's Lv obviously overturns this, and now that Lv has been developed, in most cases, Lv applications are used as HTTP bearers in internal testing, which can ensure that they can be used directly in most networks without complex configuration and debugging.

This is not to blame others, Luo Sheng's vision is decades beyond this era after all.

The current broadband speed is generally about 1M, but Luo knows that the IP network broadband will increase rapidly in the future, and it is a matter of recent years, if the current broadband speed is compared to a 10 cm diameter water pipe, then the diameter of the water pipe will expand by one meter or even more than ten meters in a few years, in this trend, the additional communication load caused by HTTP is no longer important, on the contrary, it will reflect more and more obvious advantages in ease of use, and has become the de facto standard.

Naturally, the RTSP1.0 protocol will not be chosen.

……

In the following days, Luo Sheng led the team to continue to develop and create a unique online technology LD recombination compression algorithm for Bluestar Video, and applied for a patent.

LD technology can ensure that users can watch 720P HD video smoothly in a broadband speed of less than 1M, which is definitely the world's leading streaming media technology at this time in early 2004.

Taking China as an example, the main group of Internet users now use 512K~1M broadband, and it is expected by users to be able to watch high-definition videos online smoothly under limited broadband resources, and it is also the core competitiveness of Bluestar Video.

Luo Sheng attaches great importance to the problem of whether the online video playback card is not stuck, because this is also a problem that users care about, in a word, the user experience.

Obviously, for the smoothness of online video playback, it is necessary to clarify the concept of a bit rate, that is, the larger the bit rate Kbps, the larger the file size of the video, if the bit rate is too large, the broadband speed can not keep up, the video will be stuck, or even stuck into a dog.

The highlight of the recombination compression algorithm of LD technology is that the image quality is the best in the industry with the same bit rate, and the bit rate is the lowest in the industry with the same image quality.

……

At the end of February, Luo Sheng was busy with development here, and the North American side was launched as scheduled, and the website itself was positioned as a social news site, and the slogan of the launch was: Speak ahead of the news, the voice from the Internet.

The Reddit born in Luo Sheng's hands has at least one super change from the previous Reddit, that is, it has changed its simple pages, rough graphics, large texts, etc., and the web page is beautiful and smooth.

The reason why Reddit in the previous life was slag was also because of the funds, after all, the bandwidth cost will increase accordingly, but fortunately, Bluestar Technology is not bad for money, although it has not earned a penny now.

Isn't that the money for VCs?

At the beginning of Reddit's launch, Russell Simmons, the head of product, asked for an international version of BlueSpace to help Reddit attract traffic such as pop-up ads, but was rejected by his boss George Charles.

Because Luo Sheng explained to George, and even warned him, if he dared to pop up a small advertisement window on the international version of the BlueSpace website without his permission, he would fire his squid, even if it was a small advertisement.

George is happy about his current job, he completed his performance last year, raised his salary to $1.08 million as he wished, and got the option allotment of shares of Bluestar Technology, which was exercised at the valuation price after the B round of financing, and the myth of the B round of financing made him realize that in the near future, the IPO of Bluestar Technology Company can also become a billionaire.

So far, the international version of the BlueSpace website has reached the 20 million user mark in North America, and basically all universities in the United States have been successfully captured.

Now that we're expanding beyond the university, BlueSpace's website is expanding at an unbeatable rate in North America.

As it turns out, the Chinese side has proven that this model can work, and the North American side can also succeed, and vice versa.

There is even a false impression that BlueSpace seems to be more suitable and has more potential in Europe and the United States.

With 20 million users, this is a very large amount of traffic, but it can't attract traffic, which makes Russell Simmons very depressed.

However, Bluestar Technology is currently very well-known at home and abroad, and its launch has attracted the attention of the Internet community at home and abroad, as well as the VC that invested in Bluestar Technology.

At first glance, the industry and VCs were dumbfounded.

As the pioneer of real-name social networking and the most slippery Internet company, the anonymity mechanism of the newly launched product is in stark contrast to its core business.

It's all playing with snakeskin?

……