Major streaming services in Asia including ReelShort, Viu, and iQiyi, are boosting micro dramas and artificial intelligence-powered content to capture and retain audiences in the highly-competitive regional market, top executives said on June 17.

Very short dramas with video episodes of just several minutes have quickly gained popularity in Asia in recent years, led by Chinese productions. Mostly romance-themed, they usually run in vertical formats and can last 50–100 episodes, capitalizing on viewers’ shrinking attention spans. Recently, a fast-growing number of such dramas have been generated using AI.

Joey Jia, founder and CEO of ReelShort, a streaming app owned by Beijing-based COL Group, said the company has doubled its AI team after experiencing rapid growth last year. This is despite him feeling “scared” with how “AI is completely changing the competition landscape.”

“We need more people really focusing on content—knowing how to use AI and create better” reels amid a flood of AI-generated content, Jia told an entertainment and technology conference in Bali organized by Media Partners Asia.

Jia said he was inspired by his ten-year-old daughter after seeing her watch completely AI-generated content on YouTube. She told him it did not matter if content is artificially made, saying animations are all artificial too in essence.

“I realized, at the end of the day, our [audiences] are all looking for great content. Doesn’t matter what way you” make them, Jia said.

He said that beyond the romance staple in micro dramas, AI can help companies tap a wider variety of genres: “Basically you can do anything you can imagine.”

The next important space for growth is localizing AI-generated content, Jia added, citing examples of different markets like Indonesia and Japan with different story preferences.

Speaking at the same forum, Janice Lee, managing director of Hong Kong’s PCCW Media Group and CEO of its streaming platform Viu, said AI is about “how we do things faster, be more responsive to market, perhaps at a lesser cost, so that we can redeploy the resources where it counts.”

Lee said AI can “potentially” help Viu create micro dramas, “which is a new category for us.”

Yang Xianghua, president of China’s streaming platform iQiyi International, explained how Chinese companies produced dramas using AI.

“Whether it’s a big company or small, they all have in-house AI teams,” Xianghua said, adding that AI content production generally costs much less than human-made ones.

He said that it did not matter much if the content is AI-generated or not, citing the example of animations as among the first genres widely using AI technologies. “The audiences cannot tell them apart,” he said.

He admitted that viewers are currently less keen on watching high-quality categories such as movies if they are produced using AI. “Maybe three years later, I think AI-generated … high-quality films [will feel] almost the same with human-made [ones].”

iQiyi and Viu also announced bundled subscription options to access their content for viewers in Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, and Malaysia.

Vivek Couto, CEO of Media Partners Asia, said China is expected to remain the biggest market for the fast-growing micro drama industry in the next few years. He said the industry revenue in China could reach USD 16.8 billion by 2031, from a projected USD 11.5 billion this year. In markets outside China, the revenue is projected to triple from a forecasted USD 3.2 billion in 2026.

Couto said around 40–50% of the top 100 micro dramas in China today are generated using AI.

“Winners in micro dramas won’t be the heavy spenders,” he said. “They’ll be the operators who use AI in some ways to make more bets and new genres.”

This article first appeared on Nikkei Asia. It has been republished here as part of 36Kr’s ongoing partnership with Nikkei.