At CES on Tuesday, Chinese social media giant Tencent made a surprising announcement: it’s launching a drone called “Ying.” Produced in partnership with Zerotech (a Chinese drone company that makes quadcopters), Tencent’s new flying friend will allow users to live-stream video in 720p directly to WeChat or QQ.
At the heart of Ying is Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Flight platform, a processor board the chipmaker designed specifically for drones. It will allow the drone to capture a 4K video image and then crop that image down to 1080p or 720p on the fly to achieve superior image stabilization. The resulting video can then be live-streamed or uploaded to drone video platforms on WeChat and QQ. Tencent says the drone will be “available globally,” so presumably the companies plan to link it with other live-streaming video platforms as well, but no details beyond the link-up with WeChat and QQ have yet been released.
Tencent says the drone is small, lightweight, and controllable via your existing smartphone – no surprises there. It’ll be launched at some point during the first half of this year, but details beyond that are vague: there’s no specific release date and no price yet. Given that it’s a consumer-targeted drone with social sharing being its raison d’etre, though, it may be safe to assume it won’t be priced too far away from competitors like DJI’s Phantom 3, which currently costs US$500.
Does the consumer drone market need another contender? China in particular already has a myriad of quadcopter video drones being produced by everybody from giants like DJI down to much smaller startups. But Tencent’s involvement, the super-stable footage, and the instant-gratification social livestreaming could be enough to push the Ying to the front of the pack.
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