- iQiyi CEO Gong Yu said AI will create the “bulk” of the company’s films and shows within five years — triggering the biggest corporate overhaul since the streamer’s 2010 founding.
- The Beijing-based Netflix rival officially launched Nadou Pro, an AI toolkit covering almost every stage of filmmaking — from scriptwriting and storyboards to final rendering — with plans for an international version powered by Google Veo 3.1.
- iQiyi aims to release a commercially successful AI-generated film as soon as this summer, is flooding its platform with a debut slate of 16 AI-produced titles, and will pay AI content creators an additional 20% cut of ad and membership revenue.
- The pivot is existential: iQiyi’s revenue is estimated to have fallen 13% in Q1 as short-video platforms like Douyin continue to bleed its audience, forcing the Baidu subsidiary to bet on AI as its path out of a “vicious cycle” of rising costs and falling output.
What Happened?
At its annual content showcase in Beijing, iQiyi CEO Gong Yu announced that the company is undergoing its most radical transformation since launch — pivoting from a traditional streaming platform to what he described as a social media destination built primarily around AI-generated content. The company officially unveiled Nadou Pro, an end-to-end AI filmmaking suite that draws on models from Alibaba, ByteDance, Kuaishou, and Google, and said it plans to reallocate a portion of its capital budget from professionally produced content to AI services. iQiyi also unveiled a new social video app designed to capture the mass-market momentum that OpenAI’s Sora generator briefly generated, and said it is targeting a commercially released AI-generated film by this summer. A debut slate of 16 Nadou-produced films across sci-fi and anime genres is already live on the platform.
Why It Matters?
iQiyi’s bet is one of the most explicit and sweeping commitments any major media company has made to AI-generated content — and it’s being driven by genuine existential pressure, not just enthusiasm. The streamer has watched short-video platforms like Douyin systematically erode its audience for years, and its Q1 revenue is estimated to have dropped 13%. Gong described the Chinese film industry as trapped in a vicious cycle where soaring production costs and investment risk are choking new content creation just as audiences scatter. AI, in his framing, breaks that cycle by dramatically lowering the cost and time to produce content at scale. The move also lands in the middle of a global debate — Hollywood is grappling with the same questions about AI and labor, and major US streamers from Netflix to Amazon are quietly running their own AI production experiments. iQiyi is simply saying the quiet part loud, and moving fastest.
What’s Next?
The next major milestone is iQiyi’s promised AI-generated commercial film this summer — a genuine test of whether AI-produced long-form content can hold audience attention and generate revenue at scale. Gong himself acknowledged the uncertainty, saying “I’m confident this is the right call — we’ll have our answer in a year’s time.” Meanwhile, the company’s Hong Kong listing — filed last month — will give investors a closer look at whether the AI pivot translates to financial stabilization or accelerates the revenue decline. The international launch of Nadou Pro, powered by Google Veo 3.1, could also attract attention outside China as the first major AI filmmaking platform with genuine global distribution ambitions.
Source: Bloomberg
