QuestMobile figures cited by Chinese media put ByteDance's Hongguo at about 203 million daily users in September, ahead of Kuaishou on the same basis and fourth among China's apps by time spent; the same week, Tencent's in-WeChat service Lvpaopao was reported near 90 million weekly users, and FlareFlow announced a November 2 launch in Thailand on operator AIS's AIS Play at THB39 a month. Short-drama writers, web novelists weighing adaptation and teams distributing overseas can use this to compare free ad-supported apps, social distribution and telco bundles. All user figures are third-party estimates relayed by media with differing definitions; we did not see QuestMobile's report, and the numbers say nothing about revenue or creator pay.
On October 29, China Literature said its comic-drama tool DramaBuddy now runs inside Tencent's WorkBuddy, offering 10 skills such as script and storyboard design in one workspace, and said AI translation lifted WebNovel's smaller-language revenue 160% in the first half; on October 27, Worth the Chase, the second Wattpad story adapted under its ReelShort deal, premiered with 67 episodes. Small AI comic-drama teams and authors with finished web novels can compare two routes: a platform tool bundled with an IP library and distribution, versus a serial with proven readership picked for live action. We relied on press reports for China Literature and did not test any tool; pricing, rights and author pay are not public from either company.
Short-drama platform Hongguo said in an October 27 notice on its official account that it had dealt with 20,426 low-quality or formulaic micro-dramas, naming three patterns: manufactured conflict, template "reskins" of the same plot, and reusing one face model across many characters; on October 29 China's broadcasting regulator (NRTA) reported that 158 micro-dramas totalling 5,369 episodes received distribution licences in July–September. Writers, producers and AI teams supplying Hongguo should check their plots and character faces against those three patterns before submission, and build the licence or platform-review route into project schedules. Hongguo did not say whether "dealt with" means removal or reduced reach, how similarity is judged or how to appeal, and the NRTA figure covers licensed titles only, so the two numbers cannot be compared.
SenseTime's SenseNova team published SenseNova 6.8 Code2Video on Hugging Face on October 26 (Beijing time): a 27-billion-parameter open model with a 512K context under Apache 2.0 that doesn't generate pixels but writes, renders and revises the program that draws each frame. Creators of explainers, title and caption packages, motion graphics or stylised 2D/3D shorts can put it on their trial list for work where text and timing must be exactly editable; teams making live-action or photorealistic AI short dramas can skip it for now. SenseTime shows curated examples only, with no benchmark, its deployment commands assume four GPUs, a single film takes hours of agent time, and we have not tested the output.
According to an IT Home report dated October 26, ByteDance’s Jimeng AI announced that day the launch of its Short Drama Studio, with three in-house models: DreamScript for scripts, Anycook for images and DreamShot for storyboards. It also offers single-shot reshoots, voice/background separation with re-dubbing, automatic shot splitting, and a “remake” mode that regenerates an existing short drama for a chosen art style, aspect ratio and target region. Jimeng’s homepage showed a “Short Drama Studio now live” entry on October 28. Feature descriptions are relayed from Jimeng’s announcement; we did not test results, and pricing and quotas were not publicly stated.
On October 20, 2026, Nuva Lab and FastVideo (Hao AI Lab at UC San Diego) released FastH3-Omni: an open-weight, few-step acceleration of MiniMax H3 with full omni reference input (image, video and audio, in the same class of workflow as Seedance 2.5), producing about 5–15 seconds of 24 fps video with synchronized audio in one pass. Weights and a ComfyUI pack are on Hugging Face. The license is the MiniMax H3 Community License, not OSI open source: the EU, UK, South Korea and the United States are excluded territories, and commercial use above USD 20 million yearly revenue needs a separate written authorization.
From October 20, Fanqie Novel's writer site applies version two of its posting rules for long-form web novels. By author level (Lv.0–1, Lv.2–3, Lv.4 and above) and signing mode (serial or completed-work), each account gets a daily and monthly limit on new long-form books, a daily limit on how many serial books it can update, and daily and monthly word caps per serial book. Books under the completed-work signing mode have no cap on daily updates or words. The quotas are tied to the signing-mode change and the Author Level 3.0 system that took effect on October 12; levels will be reassessed after the transition period ends, between November 12 and 14, and the quotas will move with them.
Google's Gemini API documentation says three preview models, veo-3.1-generate-preview, veo-3.1-fast-generate-preview and veo-3.1-lite-generate-preview, are deprecated and scheduled to shut down on October 22, 2026. Google names Gemini Omni Flash (gemini-omni-1.1-flash), or the generally available Veo 3.1 models on the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, as replacements. Switching is more than renaming a model: Omni uses a different API, is billed by tokens, and has different features and regional limits.
China Media Group (CMG), the national broadcaster, held its first national conference on short and medium-length dramas in Shanghai's Pudong on October 18, launching a co-creation initiative, presenting more than 20 titles, and announcing an AI-assisted script assessment partnership and a training camp. For individual writers, the only call with published rules is the global "I Am the Miracle" script and outline call, open since March and running to December; its notice says copyright in shortlisted works passes to the organisers. We found no published terms yet for the Anhui tourism script call or the training camp announced at the event.
Guangdong's provincial radio and television bureau opened its draft rules implementing the national Micro-Drama Development Management Measures for public comment on October 12, with a November 11 deadline. Compared with the national rules, the draft makes filing mandatory for Class II micro-dramas rather than optional, sets a 15-working-day review clock for Class I and II, and requires platforms to apply the same licence checks or pre-broadcast review and programme numbers to dramas uploaded through user accounts. One media report said the draft classifies interactive dramas by whether they are live-action or AI-generated; we did not find that provision in the official attachment.
FICTION · DRAMA · CREATIVE INTELLIGENCE
