iQiyi, China’s largest video streaming service with more than 400 million monthly active users, announced in its annual content presentation in Beijing which expects AI to generate most of its movies and series within five years.
Its founder and CEO, Gong Yu, summed it up before a room of producers and directors with a succinct phrase: “It’s a once-in-a-decade opportunity. We have to go with the tide.”
Why is it important. iQiyi is not a minor platform betting on a trend. It is the subsidiary of streaming of Baidu, shares with Alibaba and Tencent the online video oligopoly in China, and operates in the streaming largest in the world by number of users.
Whether it decides to pivot towards content generated entirely by AI affects how the rest of the platforms that tend to follow in its footsteps will produce, distribute and monetize audiovisual entertainment.
The context. iQiyi has been losing audience for years to Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok owned by ByteDance. Short video has cut into the time that Chinese users spend on long video platforms. The result is that its revenue has fallen by 13% in the first quarter of 2026.
The company, listed on Nasdaq, has also applied for a second listing in Hong Kong seeking closer capital. The announcement of the pivot towards AI comes from a certain pressure.
In detail. The center of the plan is Nadou Proa suite of AI tools that the company presented on April 20 and that, it says, can manage practically the entire film production process: script, storyboardvideo generation and final assembly.
The software does not work with its own models, but rather integrates those of several direct competitors: Alibaba, ByteDance and Kuaishou for the domestic market; Seedance 2.0 and Google I Spy 3.1 for the international version. iQiyi has also launched a library of virtual assets and “signed” talent for third-party creators to generate new content using the platform’s characters and universes.
The incentive strategy to attract these external creators involves…
- An extra 20% on advertising and subscription revenue for those who produce content with Nadou Pro.
- An inaugural catalog of 16 AI-generated films, in science fiction and anime.
- A public goal: release a commercially successful AI-generated film before the end of summer 2026.
Yes, but. The question that remains to be seen is whether anyone will want to pay to see that. Recent history does not invite optimism.
AI-generated video has shown some traction on TikTok and Instagram, where the cost of user attention is practically zero and the scroll Erase any disappointment in a tenth of a second. That this tolerance is transferred to a two-hour feature film for which someone pays a monthly subscription is another story.
Between the lines. Gong Yu has said that iQiyi will continue investing in professional production, but in the same sentence he has clarified that this type of content will reduce its relative weight on the platform. The direction is quite clear.
The risk is that viewers of C-dramas and the anime Koreans who have made iQiyi great are exactly the type of audience that has the least tolerance for ‘AI slop‘.
Main loser? The producers and directors who filled that room in Beijing when Gong Yu announced the pivot. iQiyi has designed a system where independent creators can use Nadou Pro to generate content and earn a percentage of the advertising revenue. It’s the same model that YouTube has applied for years with human content, now transferred to AI.
In this scheme, professionals in the sector go from being the protagonists of the production chain to being, in the best case, supervisors of a process that they no longer control.
In Xataka | In China, 470 series made with AI are produced per day. 99.9% of them do not reach anyone
Featured image | iQiyi, Xataka with Mockuuups Studio
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