Tencent puts free AI short dramas inside WeChat

A short drama can now keep playing in a small floating window while you reply to a friend. That is one of the new ways to watch inside WeChat, the messaging app built by Tencent, which has launched Lüpaopao, a free short-drama service. Its catalogue mixes AI-generated series with live-action and animated titles, and it recommends shows based on what friends are watching. Tencent is not alone in betting on short, serialized viewing on the phone.

The audience is already large. ByteDance's Hongguo reached 168 million daily active users in July, up 107% year on year, according to QuestMobile figures cited in Nomura research. That exceeds the combined app-level daily audiences of Tencent Video, iQiyi, Youku and Mango TV, four leading services for professionally produced dramas and variety shows. Hongguo's free, advertising-supported model puts it in direct competition with established streaming services for everyday viewing time. Sensor Tower reports that short-drama apps reached 25 minutes of average daily use worldwide in April 2026, up 85% from January 2025, while traditional streaming stayed at around 35 minutes.

The growth comes largely from outside the richest markets. Sensor Tower estimates that worldwide short-drama app downloads rose 140% year on year in the first quarter of 2026, while in-app purchase revenue grew 20%. Southeast Asia, Latin America and India together account for more than three-quarters of downloads. Paying viewers remain substantial: DramaBox and ReelShort each generated close to $140 million in first-quarter in-app purchase revenue. Downloads are rising faster than spending, so the audience is growing faster than the money it brings in.

AI-made dramas are also finding viewers in short-video feeds. DataEye's September ranking recorded 76.46 billion additional plays across the top 100 AI and animated dramas on Douyin, and nineteen titles passed one billion plays each, against five in August. Overseas, Ukraine-founded Holywater Tech runs the live-action service My Drama, the AI-series platform My Muse and the advertising-supported Freebits. These figures come from different trackers and measure different things, such as plays, daily users and downloads, so they cannot be added together.

For viewers, the change is mostly about where drama fits: between two messages, on the go, inside a feed they already open. For producers, social platforms are part of the distribution chain. According to Ampere Analysis's 2025 survey, 44% of social-media mini-drama viewers watched on YouTube and 38% on TikTok, and producers use those platforms both to publish complete series and to send viewers to dedicated apps. The sources do not yet show how much of the audience Lüpaopao's AI series will win, or over what timeline, since Tencent has only just introduced the service.