11-Hour Global Live Stream: DingTalk Live Streaming Supports Ant Group's 20th Anniversary "Online Celebration"

On December 8, Alipay and Ant Group celebrated their 20th birthday. To commemorate this 20th anniversary milestone, Ant Group held a birthday celebration—an event covering the widest range of internal participants and the largest in scale within the company, adopting a hybrid online-offline format. Using a variety of formats including birthday carnival activities, relay runs through time, and public welfare volunteer events, employees across different time zones were connected, reflecting on their original aspirations and paying tribute to their shared ideals. Behind this live broadcast involving tens of thousands of employees and lasting 11 hours is support offered by tools like DingTalk Live Streaming.

On December 8, Alipay and Ant Group celebrated their 20th birthday.

To commemorate the 20th anniversary milestone, Ant Group held a birthday celebration—an event covering the widest range of internal participants and the largest in scale within the company, adopting a hybrid online-offline format. Using a variety of formats including birthday carnival activities, relay runs through time, and public welfare volunteer events, employees across different time zones were connected, reflecting on their original aspirations and paying tribute to their shared ideals.

Behind this live broadcast involving tens of thousands of employees and lasting 11 hours is support offered by tools like DingTalk Live Streaming.

In the past, organizing large-scale live streaming events often encountered the following challenges:

Most live streaming platforms failed to adequately present a company’s own brand elements and convey its unique corporate culture, resulting in insufficient ceremonial feeling;

Live streaming interaction formats were often singular and uninteresting, making it difficult to actively engage employees and reducing the overall experience quality;

Maintaining stable streaming for ultra-long durations also presented huge challenges—delay, lagging, or even direct disconnection were all worrying technical failures.

The organizing team at Ant Group easily resolved the aforementioned issues using DingTalk Live Streaming. So how exactly did they achieve this?

✦Diverse interactive functions

Corporate Culture Immersion

How can we create a participatory atmosphere and an immersive experience in the digital world?

The Ant OC team focused on comment interaction, likes, and visual effects. Monotonous single-colored comments were replaced by colorful comment displays like "Happy Birthday" and "I'm here." During the live stream, Ant employees could simply tap the lower right corner of the screen to unlock exclusive 20th anniversary like logos and vibrant "Like fireworks," enabling them to enthusiastically support their colleagues’ performances remotely.

In addition, the screen-exploding multi-tap visual effects provided a stunning experience. Fireworks and birthday cake visuals occupied most of the screen, complemented by exclusive "ANT 20" greetings and trendy colorful styling, making the interaction more fun and engaging. If users didn't want the explosion effects to interrupt their viewing, they could simply switch back to the live broadcast interface with a single click, giving users flexible control.

This transformed the live broadcast from being solely for viewing to an interactive experience combining "play" and "movement." Tens of thousands of Ant Group employees found a sense of presence and belonging in the digital world, while Ant Group itself successfully conveyed its unique corporate culture.

✦Multiple rounds of lottery draws

Increased Ceremony

Live streamed prize draws often feel mundane—who can provide something new and exciting for this important company event?

Emphasizing rich ceremonial experiences was the key. By utilizing DingTalk Live Streaming’s lucky bag feature, recommendation card function, and group broadcast capability, the Ant OC team conducted 28 rounds of interactive lottery draws, continuously drawing employee attention to the live room.

Some lucky employees received travel and hotel packages by opening lucky bags, while others, simply by making comments in the comment zone, won mechanical keyboards. Some even managed to grab monthly membership cards via recommendation cards. The sheer number of formats and frequency rivaled those found at offline events.

Using the group broadcast feature, the live stream could be simultaneously shared into various discussion groups, effectively reaching large numbers of participants. The result was a significant increase in employee participation and activity in the live broadcast room.

✦Bilingual subtitles

Employees Across the Globe, One Celebration

Employees in the Ant Group are located across Hangzhou, Beijing, Shanghai, Singapore, Japan, the UK, Italy, the US, Australia, and many more locations—it is truly a globally distributed enterprise. Given such a massive organization, how do you overcome language barriers and meeting the viewing needs of employees around the world?

DingTalk Live Streaming's multilingual subtitles/translation functions addressed this need efficiently. Once activated, Ant Group employees could see real time subtitles in both Chinese and other languages (with support for Chinese, English, Japanese, and Korean). Regardless of whether they were local staff in Hangzhou or colleagues located on the other side of the world, all employees could comfortably access the real-time content of the live broadcast, enjoying a low-latency, high-concurrency viewing experience.

It is worth mentioning that the Ant OC team further ensured subtitle accuracy and timeliness by pre-configuring specialized terminology databases with DingTalk Live Streaming, including internal jargon and staff names.

✦Advanced Live Streaming Control

11-Hour Security Escort

How can an 11-hour live stream be efficiently controlled and smoothly completed like running a "marathon"?

The Ant OC team took full advantage of DingTalk Live Streaming’s co-hosting function to make continuous stream control much easier. Throughout the live stream, three dedicated co-hosts handled different responsibilities, monitoring the real-time data on the control console, pinning notable comments, and ensuring healthy, orderly audience interactions.

At the same time, the screen watermark function of DingTalk Live Streaming makes information traceable. Every viewer's streaming display will show an exclusive identifier, effectively preventing content leaks and unauthorized sharing, ensuring the security of internal information.

As a mature live streaming platform, DingTalk Live Streaming not only supports diverse live streaming interaction tools and powerful on-site control capabilities but also has an experienced technical support team providing customized solutions and other services.

"For an event like Ant’s live stream, which features high concurrency, high requirements, and multiple structures, multiple teams often collaborate together, and rehearsals and tests for streaming plans are conducted in advance. For example, three days before the official event date, we conducted multiple rounds of test runs in advance, assessing risks in case of any possible failures during the live stream and designed several redundant solutions to ensure a stable streaming experience," said a member of the DingTalk Live Streaming team.

Through DingTalk Live Streaming, Ant Group successfully connected tens of thousands of employees worldwide and created a unique celebration. This not only ensured the stability, security, and smoothness throughout the broadcast but also created a highly ceremonial and immersive employee experience.

When it comes to organizing large-scale corporate events, go with "DingTalk Live Streaming"!