China’s largest food delivery company Meituan (HKSE: 3690) has unveiled livestreaming tools for traditional educational businesses at a conference of school principals held earlier this week, according to a press release.
The tools allow schools to target users of the Meituan apps, located up to 5 kilometers away. Meituan’s Dazhong Dianping app hosts a total of 1.21 million training agencies with 3.35 million reviews. Meituan and Dianping merged in 2015.
Training agencies, which are selling group-buying courses, among other services, will have free access to some functions including the selection of livestreaming topics, display of teaching materials, and discount coupons.
Meituan’s tools are launched at a time when the number of China’s livestraming users has reached 562 million by the end of June, according to the company, citing data from the China Internet Network Information Center.
EF, which provides English language training, already adopted Meituan’s livestreaming tools before the official launch. In a 90-minutes livestreaming session during this year’s summer vacation, viewers bought a total of RMB 16.3 million (USD 2.4 million) classes for EF’s training centers, which is equivalent to one year’s revenue from tuition fees of a medium-sized school, according to the press release.
Meituan released its livestreaming features in April, first allowing tourist sites to introduce scenes to potential visitors amid the COVID-19 pandemic, at a time when the locations were mostly shut down, according to 36Kr. In September, Alibaba also started to open its livestreaming tools to other companies, KrASIA reported.