Tencent Eyes Development of Short Video Content

Tencent Video is now attempting to motivate content creators through user traffic and cash subsidies, according to a report on Friday by Chinese media outlet BiaNews.

The video streaming division of Chinese tech giant Tencent previously launched a creativity awards activity in February of this year through its official WeChat account, announcing that it would hand out 2 million yuan ($314,144) in cash subsidies throughout the year to encourage the creation of high-quality short videos related to movies, TV dramas and documentaries. The main types of short videos promoted by the event include film reviews, commentary, derivative works and interviews.

In addition, some web users recently noticed that Tencent‘s WeChat video channel was upgraded, while its form has changed from the original TikTok-like single column to a new channel mode. The WeChat video channel interface on the PC end is divided into several different channel zones, but that on smartphone app has not been revised and still appears as a single column.

In terms of channel arrangement, the tags “recommended,” “live” and “films, TV series and variety” are the top three. According to the channel arrangement rule of many websites, the higher the priority and the more likes users give, the higher the ranking of the channels will be. This also means that the category of “films, TV series and variety” currently plays an important role in the WeChat video channel.

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On this tag, many accounts are producing content related to derivative works of films and TV series, covering content both within China and abroad.

Many traditional long-video platforms have increased their investment in short videos as they have been proved to have great publicity and distribution value for films, TV series and variety shows in recent years. On March 17, Douyin, the sister app of TikTok for the Chinese mainland, announced that it had reached a cooperation with Sohu.com Limited, and the latter authorized all its self-made films and TV series content to Douyin, allowing it to carry out derivative work. In addition, iQiyi also launched its own short video sharing app Suike, and frequently launched editing activities related to film and TV dramas.