ByteDance's Jimeng AI has added a short-drama studio that keeps every stage of making a series in one workflow: script development, character and scene creation, storyboarding, video production and post-production. Until now the platform's tools were built for single jobs, such as generating one image or one video clip. The studio moves it toward coordinating a whole drama.
Three in-house models sit underneath. DreamScript writes the scripts and can work from an original story, an adaptation, or a brief aimed at overseas audiences. Anycook builds images and DreamShot handles storyboards, so creators can assemble visual assets and plan their shots. Individual shots can be swapped out, audio can be rebuilt, and an existing drama can be remade in a different visual style for another market.
TechNode took the news from the Chinese outlet iiMedia and published it on 27 October 2026. The report gives no launch date, pricing or access terms, and no one at ByteDance is quoted.
Promo frame for Dramagic, ByteDance's sister short-drama tool on BytePlus, showing its script-upload screen beside a model in jeans
Image: The Decoder
The studio is one of several short-drama tools ByteDance has built this year. Skylark launched a short-drama agent on Seedance 2.0 in March, and in mid-August the company began internal testing of a "Manju Creation Tool" for manhua dramas. Jimeng Film Studio followed in August with Shanghai Animation Film Studio and four other partners. In September BytePlus released Dramagic, an overseas-facing short-drama agent with multi-user collaboration and consistency checks. 36Kr reads these tools together as a matrix divided by content field and use.
About Jimeng AI
Jimeng AI is ByteDance's AI image and video creation platform, launched in May 2024. It covers image, video, audio, music, digital humans and motion imitation, plus a canvas that gives creators director-style control over a piece.
Since 2025 it has run the Future Image Plan and the Young Director Cooperation Plan, and sent creators' works to the Cannes, Shanghai and Busan film festivals. Seedance 2.0 arrived in February 2026, and the Jimeng app began to act as a mass-market AI content community, a sort of AI Douyin. In August 2026 it launched Jimeng Film Studio, which backs film and series projects with distribution, revenue sharing and festival submissions.
The market they serve is large. The China Netcasting Services Association counted about 128,000 short dramas published in the first quarter of 2026, roughly three times the whole of the previous year, with 95% of them AI-generated, according to The Decoder. Tsinghua's Shen Yang put one minute of AI video at $90 to $120, about a tenth of traditional production. The industry directly employs about 690,000 people, and performers have reportedly been asked to hand over their voice and likeness ahead of layoffs.
Sources · 3