Three years ago at the China Online Audiovisual Conference, while giving speeches, the leaders of long video giants suddenly let go of their dignity and sprayed short videos. The dramatic scene, which still leaves a deep impression in the industry, continues to be talked about today.
Looking back now, it seems that the long video platforms at that time still had some confidence and dared to express some anger and dissatisfaction towards the leaders of the supervisory departments below. You should know that the landscape of China's online audiovisual industry is quietly changing today, and long videos have been squeezed out of temper by competitors from all sides.
According to the "Research Report on the Development of China's Online Audiovisual Industry (2024)" released by the China Online Audiovisual Association this year, the business model of the online audiovisual industry has undergone significant changes. Emerging models such as live streaming sales and cultural tourism that have emerged in short videos have directly challenged the brand advertising and paid membership methods that long video platforms rely on for survival.
More unfortunately, it seems that long videos, even their own specialty - film and television content production, have also been "hung" for nearly two years by short dramas on the Internet platform in terms of data performance and coverage (overseas market) and other dimensions.
What we need to see is that online audiovisual will still be the main battlefield for Internet giants to compete.
As of December 2023, the scale of online audiovisual users in China has reached 1.074 billion, with a utilization rate of 98.3% among netizens. The gap between the scale of online audiovisual users and instant messaging, which ranks second, has further widened, with the leading advantage increasing from 1.84 million in 2022 to 14.14 million in 2023.
In the current era of "de foam" in the film and television industry, in a rare speech and statement made on the same stage by the leaders of all major platforms, perhaps we can have a glimpse of the direction of future industry development.
Crowding into a new direction of "AI+"
Since ChatGPT became popular, the Titanium Media app has observed that among several long video giants, iQiyi is relatively active in promoting the implementation of new technologies such as AIGC and big models in the film and television industry in public.
At the end of last year, at the 2023T-EDGE Global Innovation Conference of Titanium Media, Sun Bin, Vice President of iQiyi, shared that within iQiyi, generative AI assisted human reading has shortened the reading time from 3-4 days to about 1 hour, and the accuracy of scene and character decomposition in the script has exceeded 90%.
At the main forum of this year's China Online Audiovisual Conference, Gong Yu, founder and CEO of iQiyi, stated that in the past year, the development of the online audiovisual industry has shown three major trends, one of which is technological innovation, AI empowerment, especially generative AI, and the promotion of film and television industrialization to improve the quality and efficiency of the industry.
"In 2023, the development and application of big language models have become the core breakthrough point of technological disruptive innovation, driving the continuous acceleration of China's film and television industrialization process," said Gong Yu.
In Gong Yu's view, the revolutionary breakthrough of artificial intelligence is driving industrial transformation and forming new quality productivity. IQiyi's approach is to leverage the language comprehension ability of generative AI and the divergent ability of art and creativity to improve quality and efficiency in content evaluation, art design, and intelligent search. Specifically:
In the development phase, with the help of an AI script understanding system, scripts and novels can be condensed into story outlines, and character biographies can be written to extract character relationship graphs and assist in script evaluation;
In the promotion stage, iQiyi now generates a very high proportion of promotional posters directly with the assistance of AI, producing posters in bulk, which greatly improves the efficiency compared to previous production methods;
In the search phase, with the help of the Star Luo plot understanding platform, AI search has achieved character search, plot search, and celebrity search for minute level understanding of film and television dramas.
