Asia Innovations Group’s Uplive Presses Play On ESG program

alive, Asia Innovations Group‘s (AIG) live video entertainment platform, is to facilitate the live social company’s environmental, social and governance (ESG)-focused ‘Advance, Impact and Guard’ initiatives.

A well-known move in fintech with its online marketplace Hekka, payment aggregation platform Uppay and Taiwanese online payment service CCNet, among other products, AIG is now focusing its attention on both promoting and achieving various ESG initiatives through its Uplive platform.

Launched in 2016, Uplive allows social video streamers to share their talents and build connections in real-time with 300 million registered users from over 150 regions.

In 2021, Uplive ranked among the top consumer apps in Asia-Pacific (APAC), ranked number one in Hong Kong and Taiwanand number four i Singapore and The Philippines.

In June this year, the platform launched Uplive Avatar, which supports facial expression mirroring in virtual avatars, bringing the world one step closer to a Metaverse reality.

Through Uplive, and on all social media brands, AIG addresses the needs of society and ESG compliance.

“Through our proactive initiatives, we seek to leverage our global reach to empower financially challenged emerging market users, many of whom were impacted by the pandemic,” comments the group’s co-founder and CEO, Andy Tian.

“At the same time, we seek to protect our users through a robust, platform-specific set of best practices to ensure that both creators and users feel safe.”

AIG has redesigned its own acronym for the occasion, cleverly explaining the direction of its initiatives through “progress, influence and guard”.

Advance

Eighty-six percent of AIG’s users come from an emerging market where more than half live on just $200 a month, or $2,400 annually. The group has paid hundreds of millions of dollars to its emerging content creators since its inception, encouraging underserved communities to engage with audiences and improve their livelihoods and careers.

Tian explains that “the company is projected to generate nearly a billion dollars in annual payouts to creators over the next few years. Much of that revenue is funneled back into underprivileged families across the developing world.”

Uplive projects the talents of underserved communities to a global audience and encourages them to monetize their talents and careers.

impact

AIG’s initiatives are to align it more precisely with charitable organizations around the world, many of them providing humanitarian relief in times of crisis.

The announcement cited the group’s work with the likes of UNICEF and Children’s House.

Uplive will continue to raise awareness of these pressing issues. During Ramadan last year, the platform hosted an online charity song contest to raise money for UNICEF’s initiative to purify water and help provide clean drinking water to children.

Uplive also organized a live-streamed mini-concert to raise money for Typhoon victims; a devastating experience that many of the platform’s users in APAC will be familiar with. For example, the Philippines’ Typhoon Rai (Super Typhoon Odette), which hit the country in December 2021, caused a catastrophic amount of damage and killed 410 people while costing an estimated $1.02 billion to repair.

Guard

AIG uses a four-pronged approach to protect its users, such as using artificial intelligence (AI) to review content along with various cybersecurity tools to give users control over their privacy and information.

Community content reporting and monitoring measures, similar to the US social media industry, impose severe contractual penalties on those who violate the platform’s policies, including demonetization, shutdown of streams, and total account bans.

“ESG will continue to be a core building block in what we hope to continue to achieve under our ‘advance, impact and guard’ initiative,” says Tian. “Discussion on how to govern with a strong social conscience is an existential aspect of our existence as a company across the board as we seek to empower both creators and users.”