Alibaba Working on a Set-Top Box to Bring E-Commerce to Your TV?

Last year it was cheap smartphones; this year the China trend — again, inspired by Xiaomi — appears to be set-top boxes. LeTV announced a new one earlier this spring, last week PPTV launched the unfortunately-named PPBox, and now rumor has it that Alibaba is working on a set-top box that will run a version of its Aliyun mobile OS and integrate with Aliyun smartphones.

This rumor comes to us, as many do, from Sina Tech’s “knowledgable” sources, and should be taken with a grain of salt until it has been announced by Alibaba (the company does not comment on rumors). Supposedly, the idea is, among other things, that the box could lead to TV-based e-commerce. But as Xiaomi learned last fall, offering a set-top box requires a government license that can only come through a mandatory partnership with a few state-approved media providers, so if Alibaba is serious about the project it will need to partner up with one of them.

But the bigger hurdle might be Aliyun OS itself, which despite massive investment from Alibaba hasn’t really taken off as the Android competitor the company hoped it could become. At present, it’s not really clear what consumers would get out of Alibaba’s set-top box that they couldn’t get from many of the other available offerings, and I’m skeptical that people really want to do much shopping on their TV sets. But I’ve been known to be wrong, and betting against Alibaba often proves unwise, so who knows. If Ali really is working on a set-top box, it’s definitely something to watch for.

(via Sina Tech)