Late at night in early November, in a studio in Changsha Wangcheng Chuangshazhou OPC Block, the computer screen was always on. Zhou Yu, the person in charge of Changsha 456 Culture Co., Ltd., continues to stare at the background data.
Recently, his team transformed a popular domestic short drama into an AI short drama and released it overseas. Three versions in English, Spanish and Portuguese were launched together. It reached the top of the overseas AI short drama daily list, reaching fifth place, and earned nearly one million yuan in two months.
"In the era of live-action short dramas, three language versions require three teams and three times the budget; with AI, translation, dubbing, and localization can be done in one process." Zhou Yu said that the company has successively launched more than ten AI short dramas in multiple overseas markets such as Europe, the United States, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Latin America, and currently overseas revenue has accounted for 60%.
One after another overseas hit cases reflect the strong trend of China's AI short drama industry taking advantage of the trend to go overseas. Reports show that the overseas micro-short drama market outside China will exceed US$6 billion in 2026, a year-on-year increase of 67%. In the first nine months of this year, the top 10 most downloaded micro-short drama apps in overseas markets were all Chinese-based. As of the end of September, AI dramas accounted for over 60% of overseas micro-short dramas.
From "selling dramas" to exporting platforms, technologies and ecology, the popularity of AI short dramas overseas is leading the overseas development of Chinese short dramas into a new stage of industry chain collaboration.
In May this year, the Malanshan Cultural Industry Overseas Alliance was established, focusing on the overseas micro-short drama track. The alliance brings together entities from the entire chain including scripts, production, dubbing, and distribution. Its members have expanded from more than 30 companies at the beginning to more than 50 in five months, and have released more than 1,000 works globally.
As the vice-chairman unit of the alliance, the Malanshan Audio and Video Laboratory's self-developed AI translation platform provides technical support for short plays to go overseas: the 120-minute subtitle translation is shortened from at least 3 days to 4 to 5 hours. As of October, the platform has provided translation and dubbing services for a total of 16,000 short dramas, supporting more than 40 languages.
"Chinese short dramas did not go overseas overnight, but experienced a path from translation expansion to platform-based originality, from content migration to localized customization." According to Yang Chenghu, deputy dean of the School of Art and Media at Beijing Normal University, behind this is a systematic upgrade of content strategy, creation methods and operational thinking.
The confidence to go overseas comes from the surging industrial boom in China.
The scale of the industry is expanding rapidly - data from the State Administration of Radio and Television revealed that in the first eight months of this year, 430,000 micro-short dramas were launched nationwide, 13 times the number last year, of which over 90% were AI dramas. According to industry estimates, the number of users of micro-short dramas has reached 850 million. In 2026, the total market size of my country's micro-short dramas, AI dramas, and comics will exceed 121 billion yuan.
A new force is emerging in the audiovisual landscape - In September, the 16th China Golden Eagle Television Arts Festival established the honorary unit of micro-short dramas for the first time. The "China-ASEAN Micro-Shorts International Communication Development Report" gives a judgment: Micro-shorts are becoming the fourth largest global audio-visual product form after American movies, Japanese animations, and Korean TV series.
Behind the craze, breakthroughs in AI video technology are rewriting the cost logic of the short drama industry. In February this year, ByteDance released a new generation of AI video generation model, Seedance 2.0, which costs about 1 yuan/second to generate videos. According to industry estimates, the cost of a traditional live-action short drama is generally between 500,000 yuan and 1 million yuan, while the cost of an AI short drama of the same level is about 100,000 yuan to 200,000 yuan, and the production cycle has been compressed from "months" to "days".
To move costs down, we must first leverage the transformation of creative logic. Battlefields with thousands of troops and unrestrained fantasy were synonymous with large investments in the past, but now small teams can present them calmly. Some practitioners lamented that the most powerful thing about AI is not saving money, but allowing stories that cannot be filmed or tried to be finally given a chance to be told.
Employment and entrepreneurial vitality burst out simultaneously. A report from the China Internet Audiovisual Association shows that the main production links of micro-short dramas have created 1.333 million jobs. New positions such as prompt engineers, AI adjusters, and avatar designers have been created from scratch, attracting young people to find employment, and opening up new channels for many film, television, online writing, and animation practitioners.
Nowadays, a few people, a few computers, and a set of AI tools can support a content company. Small, medium and micro teams and even individual creators can stand on the same starting line as large institutions.
The size of the AI drama and comic drama sectors this year is expected to exceed 40 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of approximately 138%, making it one of the fastest-growing sectors in the cultural industry. Upstream computing power and modeling, midstream production and translation, downstream distribution and investment are all closely linked. The industry chain is accelerating upgrading and spilling over to cultural tourism, e-commerce, brand marketing and other fields.
If you run fast, you must obey the rules. On September 1, the "Measures for the Development and Management of Micro-Short Dramas" came into effect. AI micro-short dramas must add reminder signs in prominent locations in each episode; algorithm models that induce user addiction, excessive consumption, etc. are not allowed. Starting from November 1, the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television has deployed a new round of special measures to combat the vulgarity and homogeneity of micro-short dramas.
In the view of many industry insiders, clearer rules are the "escort" for the healthy growth of the industry, pushing the industry to shift from "struggle for quantity" to "struggle for quality."
"In the future, shooting and editing will no longer be the threshold. The focus of competition will be who can tell a good story." Leng Song, director of the Audiovisual Research Office of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, believes that artificial intelligence and humanism should go both ways. "On the basis that content is king, taste will also be king in the future."
From "formula" to "style", from "traffic" to "word of mouth", changes are continuing.
Recently, an AI short drama called "Armed into the Song Dynasty" became popular all over the Internet. The plot is not complicated: a modern five-person team travels back to the Xuanhe period of the Northern Song Dynasty, farming in Qinghe Village, training troops, resisting enemies, and getting promoted. Data shows that "Armed into the Song Dynasty", which has been updated to its tenth season, has accumulated more than 4 billion views on the entire network.
In addition to the data, what deserves more attention is a comment from a netizen: This short play walks the audience into the history of the Northern Song Dynasty and explores another possibility of history. The emergence of popular products has also given a clear direction to the entire track: AI is responsible for lowering the threshold, and what truly retains people's hearts is always the sincerity and weight of the story.
A small screen connects the vast market with thousands of creators. AI short plays are a vivid practice of new productivity in the cultural field, lowering the threshold for entrepreneurship and broadening the employment stage. At the same time, it is also reshaping the way of content production, allowing the influence of Chinese culture at home and abroad to continue to expand.
In the Thousand Sails Race, AI short dramas are breaking through with "newness" and moving towards "quality", constantly releasing new vitality in the cultural industry.
