LETV, a Chinese Internet company that struck fortune as a video streaming service, is now on what it calls a “blindfold run” into carmaking.

“It may make us look silly and also crazy,” Jia Yueting, founder and CEO of Letv said last week, during the launch of the company’s new “killer” products in Beijing. “But an idea disregarded by 99 percent of people might hold the very power to disrupt the market.”

The “killers” are limited to the company’s vision of a self-developed “super” electric cars. The launch also featured a 1S smartphone as cheap as 1,099 yuan (US$174) and a 120-inch uMax Super TV as expensive as nearly 500,000 yuan.

Letv, short for Leshi Internet Information & Technology, was founded by Jia, an Internet pioneer, in 2004, with the goal of creating a “Letv ecosystem” vertically integrated to offer a platform of content, devices and applications.

Letv.com currently offers more than 100,000 episodes of TV dramas and over 5,000 movie titles. In addition, the site draws an estimated 250 million page views per day, 350 million users per month, 100 million daily content viewers on mobile devices, and 10 million daily content viewers on large-screen TVs.

So why not capitalize on its track record and move into the new trend of convergence between the Internet and automobiles?

Two years ago, the company started its automotive research and development unit, which recently finished a prototype Mule Car at its US base. Though every spec about the car is still under tight wraps, the project itself has been gathering attention and creating ambiguity amid the fanfare mounted since last year.

While some sort of model for scrutiny won’t be unveiled until the Beijing Auto Show next April, that doesn’t stop the company from endlessly promoting the car. Is this blindfolded run a bold single-minded move into the future or just a reckless venture based on hype?

One thing clear about Letv: it knows how to parlay the power of the Internet, tapping the overarching theme of our times and its surefire attraction for capital investment and recruitment of professional talent.

Investors seem to buy the story. Half a year after it announced its plan to build cars, the company’s shares soared 5.5 times to its historical high in May. Even after a plunge following China’s stock market crash in June, it is still the biggest capitalized company on the exchange’s ChiNext growth enterprise board with its price/earnings ratio measuring as high as 185 times as of yesterday.

The Internet is now a realm of vertical integration, blurring the classic boundaries of industries as the digital age takes over our daily lives. Business expansion follows the call for a more streamlined user experience in Internet service and more Internet-enabled things in the physical world.

In some sense, Letv has cast itself as a poster child for change.

That follows its transformation from an online video portal to a full-fledged entertainment player, producing content, encouraging app development and also making hardware devices to secure multiple footholds offline.

What it lacks in manufacturing experience it makes up for with ability to attract talent from established market players – wooing entrepreneurial spirits who want to be part of historic change.

A team of 700 research and development specialists has been assembled for Letv’s auto business unit under the helm of Ding Lei, a more than 20-year veteran of the auto industry. Ding oversaw several traditional original equipment manufacturers before joining Letv’s car business as a co-founder in September.

“Carmaking should no longer start from the perspective of building a transportation tool,” Ding told those attending the product launch. “It should be simulating scenarios of users’ Internet-enabled journeys.”

Digital ‘eco-system’

That tickled the fancy of listeners without giving away much detail.

Ding cited the example of the shift from home to car in daily digital life. We are no longer satisfied to sit at home and look at a computer screen. We want a variety of screens — from TVs to tablets to in-vehicle consoles — displaying the same programs. This user behavior coincides with the rise of autonomous driving concepts.

The digital “eco-system” holds promises of magic synergy, Letv said, denying that it has pinched its pitch from Apple buzzwords.

Letv said unlike Apple’s exclusive approach, it will be open to third-party input.

Massive user traffic flow is known as the ultimate money-spinner in the intangible online world, equivalent to prime locations in the bricks-and-mortar world. The only difference is that cyberspace knows no limits.

Letv’s aim is to scale up an eco-system with strong user “stickiness” to strike pay dirt. That is a business model that it believes will eventually subsidize its low prices for making hardware devices, including cars.

This logic stands up if the user groups of its content, services and hardware overlap to an extent that creates scale of economies.

Letv’s sales of TVs bigger than 70 inches have surpassed 4 million units since their debut in 2013. Sales of smartphones have exceeded 1 million units since their launch in the middle of the year. But can this impressive momentum be sustained in the launch of a car that essentially isn’t first and foremost an entertainment provider, which is Letv’s specialty?

Letv hints that its super electric car will outperform rivals in technical specs. Given its reputation for selling hardware at prices lower than costs, the company may be planning to price the car at an unreasonably affordable level.

At the moment, self-driving cars are deemed to be at least a decade away from popular application. Given technological and regulatory constraints, a car’s Internet experience will hardly sell as a killer function, not to mention a killer product, to drivers who in most cases are car buyers in China.

If the company can withstand the pressure of running a capital-intensive business like car manufacturing, which pales that of making consumer electronics, it will be fine for it to walk a fine line between being out of time and ahead of time until its day comes.

It is an issue that Letv has been trying to tackle through partnerships with existing carmakers, and yet complicating with its decision to make cars electrically powered from the very start. It is a new technology lacking in economies of scale on an industrial basis as well as infrastructure support. It may cost extra for Letv, through drastically lower pricing and self-investment in charging hardware, to convince consumers of its merits.

Before its own car comes out, Letv wants to test its synergy effects first on ride shares. Yidao Yongche, an Uber-style car-hailing app in which Letv bought 70 percent stake into last month, has started to offer free rides to users of cars in Letv’s eco-system. That system is supposed to draw self-sustaining power from generating user subscriptions of Letv content and charging various partners stationed in the system for business opportunities arising from user traffic flow.

This experiment started yesterday, with Yidao Yongche handing out vouchers of 1,099 yuan for ride shares to each of the first 10,000 buyers of Letv’s newly launched 1S smartphone on its official e-commerce platform.

Zhou Hang, founder and CEO of Yidao Yongche, is currently coy about revealing more details on how the free Letv eco-system car can cover its costs.

Letv is undoubtedly a good hawker of intrigue in his “blindfold run,” cheering loudly for itself and giving every established market player an “I am coming” heads-up.

No one tends to stand in its way, at least not before the concept runs to the end, where its much vaunted self-developed car waits to hop into the parade.