Seoul Economic Daily describes a new Chinese model for exporting entertainment: produce huge volumes of short dramas cheaply with AI, then sell them abroad through China's own apps and streaming services. Korea, by contrast, still competes mainly with expensive, polished films and series. The shift now, the paper says, is to use AI to slash cost and time and ship the results abroad.
The numbers it cites are large. Research firm Media Partners Asia puts the global short-drama market at $12 billion last year, up from $5 billion in 2023, and expects $26 billion by 2030. China's own market is growing about 200% a year and some observers expect it to pass 100 billion yuan next year. Quoting CNN, the paper says more than 95% of the 18,000 short dramas released in China in the first quarter were made with AI, and that more than 1,300 titles go up each day.
AI output is also reaching television. Hunan TV gave a prime-time slot to a 30-episode, 40-minute-per-episode Journey to the West drama made with AI at every step, from script to rendering. The report says it took four months and a tenth of a normal budget, with no actors, locations or sets, and some see it as a marker of where the video business is heading. At peak hours, a new AI short drama goes up in China about every 20 seconds. The content then travels through Douyin, iQiyi and other platforms to Southeast Asia and North America, with production, distribution and payment handled in one place.
The effect shows up in Korea too. iQiyi's Korean app reached 200,000 monthly users in January, about 1.5 times the year before, and some heavy viewers pay for as many as seven services at once.
Korean companies are adapting. Distributor Showbox has launched a short-drama label, Showbite, with 20 titles on the way, including Taste of You. Directors of ten-million-admission hits such as Lee Joon-ik and Lee Byung-hun are trying the format, and CJ ENM has unveiled an AI hybrid film, The House. Critic Kim Hun-sik expects AI short-form to grow as its own niche rather than replace carefully made work, pointing to the global response to Odyssey as proof that audiences still reward craft.
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