Baidu CEO Robin Li. Photo credit: Fortune Live Media, licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0

Baidu, the Chinese tech giant, has announced that it’s reached a deal to acquire YY Live, the live-streaming service owned by YY, which is a major social video platform in China. Baidu is coughing up $3.6 billion in cash to acquire the streaming service from YY’s owner, Joyy, and expects the acquisition to be completed in the first half of next year. 

With YY Live, Baidu is getting a leading live-streaming platform in China to add to its large ecosystem of internet services that currently cover 1 billion monthly active users.

Joyy is parting away with one of its most prized services but for a lucrative fee nevertheless. YY Live is a dominating live-streaming platform in China with about 40 million monthly active users as of the third quarter of this year. It’s part of the bigger YY.com platform which itself has over 300 million users.

Joyy is parting away with YY Live a year after it acquired a similar service, Bigo, that’s targeted at markets outside China. Bigo owns Bigo Live, a popular live streaming platform, and Likee, a well-known short-form video app. As a company, Bigo was initially a side project of Joyy’s own founder, David Li, that sought to recreate YY’s success in China in overseas markets. It saw good success with its plan and got scooped up by Joyy for a price of $1.45 billion in March last year.

Now under Baidu, YY Live will continue to target growth in the Chinese market and will now have access to Baidu’s massive user network to help facilitate that growth.

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