philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

HTC Plans to Use Alibaba’s Cloud to Popularize Virtual Reality in China

HTC has been trying to make headway in VR in many places.

Here’s one way virtual reality could get a big push in China.

HTC has signed a partnership with Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba that will see HTC use Alibaba’s cloud computing services for its nascent virtual reality unit. The struggling Taiwanese smartphone maker has been trying to make headway into the virtual reality space with its HTC Vive headset as its core smartphone business continues to weaken.

By partnering with Alibaba’s cloud computing arm, HTC said that the two companies will work together to improve the behind-the-scenes data center infrastructure required to deliver virtual reality content to consumers.

“Cloud computing has continuously broken the boundaries of what we thought possible, accelerating the rate of innovation,” said Ge Jin, Alibaba’s cloud business architect director, in a statement. “The partnership between Alibaba Cloud and HTC will bring two of the world’s most disruptive technologies together to bring more value to businesses looking to leverage VR and cloud.”

The alliance makes sense for HTC as it continues its efforts to popularize its Vive headset. In order for virtual reality and 360-degree videos to stream to viewers without hiccups, the data center infrastructure needs to be flexible and powerful enough to support the large bandwidth requirements needed to deliver such large video files.

See the full story here; http://fortune.com/2016/08/10/htc-alibaba-cloud-virtual-reality/