Winter in advance, summer for drama fans？
The last three months of advance on demand.
Wen | Fu Qiongyin
Edit | Zhang Youfa
The Fog Theater has not been officially aired, and it has been searched four times.
In the third quarter of last year, Misty Theater became a hot topic with many suspense dramas such as Hidden Corner and Silent Truth, and a wave of suspense short plays rose in the market. The concept of theater is also considered as a new stage of content operation of streaming media platform.
The way of unified investment promotion and publicity in the theater also makes the business model of short plays explore further. At this point, the wind of advanced on-demand has blown up, and every work in the theater has also started to advance on-demand
By the time the Fog Theater returns this year, the drama market has changed greatly.
Two years after it was invented, the advanced on-demand mode was cancelled by Aiqiyi, Tencent and Youku. For the first time, the delayed drama that adopted the advanced on-demand mode has become the object of criticism by the official media this year, and only appeared silently in the overseas film list of the streaming media platform. The trend of short plays is still there, and long plays are getting shorter and shorter, but plays with more than 30 episodes and less than 50 episodes are still the mainstream in the market.
Looking back at the three months before the disappearance of VOD, some changes are already brewing.
When costume drama becomes a joke
From the word of mouth, this is the season when costume dramas become jokes.
"Ugly man in ancient costume" is a hot topic this season. The top 10 and 6 short comments on the costume drama "Jun Jiu Ling" are all accusing the actor of being ugly, and the comment that the tucao actor is "ugly out of the realm" has 778 people like it. Netizens even listed a list of "Ugly Men in Costume 101" to accuse the actor in costume drama of "unable to bear to look straight".
The hero’s "Yan value" is not satisfactory, but it is only a side reflection of the poor performance of costume dramas. In Yunhe data "TOP20 of the Top 20 of the Top 20 of the Top 20 of the New Series Played in Q3", there are only four costume dramas, and only "Zhou Sheng as usual" scored above 7 points, and the masterpiece "Song of the King" of Huanrui Century did not make the list.
In addition to the periodicity of content creation, the high proportion of sweet pet dramas in this quarter may be the main reason.
Zhou Sheng as usual and All My Life, which are split from the same novel, use the sadomasochism of the former to solve the "boredom" of the sweet pet of the latter; There are four men around the hostess of "Jun Jiu Ling" who never leave; "Song of the King" is the old way of "the belly-black emperor falls in love with me"-the scores of the last two films are not more than 5 points.
The sweet pet drama, which often strikes back at a small cost, has become a hot type in the market since 2015 when "go princess go" was set to strike back all the way with the thunder people of the "poor crew" and became a popular online drama.
According to the "Research Report on Domestic Drama Market in 2020" released by Yien Data, sweet pet dramas account for 44% of the total number of online dramas broadcast in 2020, and most of them are small dramas with less than 30 episodes. At present, there are many costume dramas that are being spit out by the audience, and many of them are such low-cost accounting dolls.
Go princess go (Source: Douban)
On the contrary, in the contemporary theme, there are many works with both word-of-mouth and enthusiasm. Urban theme is still the mainstream in this quarter. There are 33 urban dramas in the new dramas in 2021Q3, accounting for 29% of the total new dramas in the world, and the effective broadcast accounts for 44%.
Among them, Sweeping the Black Storm, You are My Glory and Yunnan Worm Valley are among the top three in Yunhe Data, and the TOP10 of the 10 new domestic dramas in 2021Q3 are rated as contemporary themes, with the highest score of 8.2, I’m fine in another country.
However, as the champion and runner-up of Q3 episodes, Sweeping the Black Storm and You Are My Glory are hard to copy.
The former has a golden lineup of "Endorsement of the Central Political and Legal Committee+Tencent Video Production+Sun Honglei+500 Directors", which is an unofficial work that is difficult to shoot; The latter is authorized by the glory of the king for the first time, and has established contact with Penguin Film and Television since the stage of writing novels in Gu Man, and the drama series can even go to the space base when shaping the hero’s space career.
While making good use of the scarce value, Sweeping the Black Storm and You Are My Glory also have some "atypical" operating ideas.
In order to be different from the past detective dramas, Wu Bai used a lot of subjective shots such as "the protagonist’s perspective" in "Sweeping the Black Storm" to strengthen psychological description, which is usually more used in movies; "You are my glory" is different from the "rapid progress" of the general sweet pet drama. It was not until the 21 ST episode that the relationship was formally determined, and at the same time, it tried its best to describe the "grounded" side of the "ungrounded" career.
The scarcity of the theme provides the audience with a long-lost freshness. The atypia means that the production of high-quality modern themes is not only a production problem, but also a resource acquisition problem. The ability to control and integrate scarce resources will continue to be the advantage of the future platform.
Although the "film sense" of "Sweeping the Black Storm" is effective in both the subject matter and the shooting method, it also has the problem of "acclimatization".
Although the score of "Beizhenanyuan" is only 5.0, its photography and lighting team almost meets the requirements of film texture, but when the plot of a series is widely questioned, emphasizing texture is putting the cart before the horse; Douban 7.0′ s "Double Detective" is full of film resumes, which can’t save the slightly loose plot.
The exploration of film sense continues this season, but the IP that has been verified by the market has been questioned.
This is a season of collective decline in the word-of-mouth of grave robbery. The "Stealing Pen" series has just earned back a part of its reputation by Ultimate Notes, and it has been severely trampled by Genting Tiangong with a score of 2.6. As of press time, the douban score of Yunnan Worm Valley is 6.3, while the previous work Longling Cave has a high score of 8.3. The "Trio", which has been highly praised, has been questioned by the routine in this film.
"Yunnan Worm Valley" is the fourth ghost blowing lamp produced by the same team. How long can the long-term value of the drama IP last?
The last season of advance on demand
This is the last season of advanced on-demand existence, and the shutdown came by surprise.
On September 10th, Tencent Video rushed to Weibo for hot search in one fell swoop due to the adjustment of advance on demand. Since the Shanghai Consumer Protection Committee and China Consumers Association thought that "unlocking episode by episode" was unreasonable, Tencent’s video was adjusted in "Yunnan Worm Valley", and then the episodes on demand in advance can be unlocked. According to china securities journal, iQiyi and Youku will also follow up.
In the third quarter, advanced on-demand is still going on as usual and making steady progress.
According to Yunhe data, 46 advanced on-demand dramas were launched in 2021Q3, an increase of 9 over the same period of last year. Super-drama accounts for 41% of the total number of new dramas in the world, an increase of 11 percentage points year-on-year. In addition, the effective broadcast of the advanced on-demand drama series during the on-demand period was 600 million, an increase of 82% compared with 2020Q3; Among them, the on-demand content of "Sweeping Black Storm" effectively played more than 100 million yuan, creating a peak of on-demand content playback.
The "Sweeping the Black Storm", which set the peak of the broadcast, pushed forward the nodes that were ahead of schedule. The 28-episode "Sweeping the Black Storm" has been launched on-demand since 15 episodes. In the interview, Poison Eyes learned that many dramas have achieved good results in the third quarter, such as "You are my glory" and "The dust of the ages".
The audience seems to be used to showing their love and recognition for the drama series by pre-ordering. After unlocking "You are My Glory" in advance, you will see a large number of viewers who say "come with money" in the barrage. When "Sweeping Black Storm" was broadcasted, many people even asked "Is it possible to unlock it to the end with one button?" However, for a drama with poor reputation like "Eight Dragons", some people will question "How can this be on-demand in advance?"
This model, which survived for two years, came to an end on October 4th by three platforms. At present, only Mango TV and bilibili, two platforms that have started advance VOD, have not expressed their views.
Short-lived advance on demand was once a life-saving medicine invented by streaming media platform.
Judging from the financial reports of each family in the first half of the year, the trend of slowing down the growth rate of members continues further. In the first half of the year, the number of paying members of iQiyi Q1 increased by 3.6 million, while Q2 only increased by 900,000, and the growth rate declined. The number of paid members of Tencent Video reached 125 million, up 9% year-on-year, unchanged from the first quarter. Youku only disclosed the average daily paying users, which increased by 35% in the first quarter and 17% in the second quarter, but the specific figures are unknown.
Membership operation is the basic logic of streaming media, but the traditional mode of supporting membership growth has almost touched the ceiling, which makes several traditional streaming media platforms still in a state of narrowing losses but not turning losses into profits.
Iqiyi Q1 and Q2 have revenues of 8 billion yuan and 7.6 billion yuan respectively. Although they still face losses, the losses have been reduced for five consecutive quarters. The information revealed by Youku in the financial report also mentioned that the loss narrowed year-on-year, because of "rigorous investment in content and optimization of paid membership plan".
The form is critical, even to the point where the top management of the three platforms directly fired short videos at the network audio-visual conference. In recent years, the platform has also raised the price of members, launched a variety of preferential packages and other means, and advanced on-demand is also a product born in this form.
At the same time, advance VOD is also a way to transplant the fan economy to the drama series. It is no accident that the advanced on-demand mode was born in the American drama with a high vertical fans. It is one of the links of the huge fan economic industrial chain of the drama. At the same time that The Untamed released the advanced on-demand video, the title of Tencent video "Huang Goose Niang" was also widely circulated in Weibo, and users’ personification and emotional connection with the platform seemed to be deepening.
However, for producers, advanced on-demand can not bring C-end revenue. In these two years, advanced on-demand has not yet become one of the producers’ sources of income. Many producers don’t have the right to participate and know, and they don’t know when their plays will be on demand in advance.
Will there be a Netflix mode in which members can watch the complete works at one time after the cancellation of advance demand? In 2016 and 2017, when the members of the platform were crazy, "members read the complete works at one time" also appeared, but most of them were driven by high popularity starring, or a backlog drama with little impact on income.
The recent popularity of "Squid Game" has also made the comparison between Netflix mode and domestic streaming media a hot topic. One of the questions is whether it is possible for domestic streaming media to do less dramas with more money like Netflix.
Wu Yuefeng, manager of Fengjing Capital Fund, once analyzed in Weibo that iQiyi will launch 15-20 TV dramas and 3-5 variety shows in a quarter, so if it is dismantled, the cost of each drama will be only a few hundred million dollars, which can only maintain the overall qualified quality.
However, Netflix’s total operating cost last year was 20.4 billion US dollars (about 133.2 billion RMB), and this figure was as high as 10.4 billion US dollars (69.1 billion RMB) in the first half of this year, of which the single-season content expenditure was roughly 5-6 of that of iQiyi. However, the number of series produced by Netflix is not so much, and its heavy new works planned for 2021 are only 21.
Sharing Netflix’s huge content cost is global dumping. At present, Netflix has entered more than 160 countries around the world, and Latin America and Asia-Pacific even have about 1/2-1/3 users in the United States.
After the announcement of the end of advance on demand, the task of increasing the number of members’ subscriptions and the paid value of individual members has become more heavy. It’s just that unlike Netflix’s positioning as a global user, domestic streaming media platforms need to increase to the sinking market.
QuestMobile data shows that by October 2020, sinking users have occupied 58% (669 million) of the cmnet market, but the average monthly usage time of sinking users is only 140.1 hours, and those after 00 and 70 are potential people for further growth of the sinking market.
In this regard, streaming media is also making changes through hardware+software. For example, iQiyi has launched the iQiyi Extreme Edition for the characteristics of mobile phone use in the sinking market. The Extreme Edition is promoted to the sinking market. "I hope that after they see the higher quality film and television content, because the film and television content is produced by professional directors, screenwriters and actors, they can put more time on the film and television content." Gong Yu, founder and CEO of iQiyi, once told the media.
Tencent is involved, and the head company is absent
No matter from the number of broadcasts or broadcast data, Tencent video is the best in this quarter.
Tencent videos accounted for 13 of the TOP20 episodes in Q3, among which three solo dramas, Sweeping the Black Storm, You are my glory and Yunnan Worm Valley, took the top three. These three series are broadcast one after another for the S-class drama of Tencent Video this quarter, and Tencent also has such a happy trouble of "rolling itself".
(Source: Yunhe Data)
Driven by several major dramas in August, Tencent’s video performance in 2021Q3 was outstanding, with several major dramas launched continuously in summer, and the number of dramas on the whole network effectively played 31.2 billion, ranking first in the platform, but there was still a 12% decline compared with 20Q3. The effective broadcast of the whole network dramas of iQiyi and Youku were 28.5 billion and 14.9 billion respectively, down 20% and 17% year-on-year.
At the same time, the effective broadcasting of Mango TV and bilibili has improved.
Although dramas such as "Song of the King" and "Bailingtan" have insufficient reputation, they still drive the effective broadcast of Mango TV to increase by 3% year-on-year. Last year, bilibili entered the drama battlefield with a high-profile film "The Sky of Wind Dog Boys". This year, in Q3, new dramas such as "Double Mirrors", "Sudden Vacation" and "Best Friends" were added, and the effective broadcast increased by 26 times compared with the same period of last year.
Five platforms are fighting in the field of drama, and "theatrical" is the direction that all of them are exploring. However, compared with last year’s misty theater fire, this year’s theater performance is weak.
According to the TOP20 data above, there are two top 20 dramas in the Love Theater where Iqiyi focuses on sweet pet dramas, namely "A Life" and "Zhou Sheng as usual"-these two dramas are separated from a novel, telling the story of Shengchen Zhou and Shishi, and they are strictly one drama.
Mango’s monsoon theater, a fire, "I am quite good in other places", but unfortunately the follow-up is weak. Monsoon Theater does not have a strong collection of works like Fog Theater and Favorite Theater, and the commonality between works is not very strong. At present, the biggest common point among the works of Monsoon Theater is that "the number of episodes does not exceed 16", and the loose collection and the unity of form are still the idea of comparative satellite TV.
Practitioners who have been exposed to Mango TV told Poison Eye that Monsoon Theater also has some traditional satellite TV ideas in content selection and production. For example, the first version of the script "Mother-in-law’s Bracelet" was once considered to be not bloody enough, and the target was not sinking enough, so it was finally revised.
Mother-in-law’s bracelet
However, as a theatrical effect that has been verified to occupy users’ minds and form a brand effect, it will not be abandoned by the platform. The return of Misty Theater is just around the corner. According to informed sources, bilibili is also planning his own theater.
Compared with the competition of multiple dramas in the same period between platforms, the performance of the head company is much quieter.
Six head drama companies that often appear together in many statements: Noon Sunshine, Xinli Media, Ciwen Media, Yaoke Media, Huace Film and Television, and Ning Meng Film and Television, only noon handed over the highly acclaimed Children of the Qiao Family in the third quarter. Xinli Media is still spinning in the low-scoring Jin Yong drama.
In the past, among the listed companies, Tang De Film and Television broadcasted a small-budget sweet pet drama "The Secret of Hidden Grimes", and two dramas of Huanrui Century, Genting Tiangong and Song of the King, both suffered a decline in word of mouth. On the contrary, the "new forces" in the era of online drama performed well. The drama "Sweeping the Black Storm" produced by Wuyuan Culture was well received, and "Sailing: When the Wind blows" produced by Little Sugar Man also had a good score of 8.5.
In the last quarter of 2021, it may be that "Tencent involution" will enter the stage of all-platform involution. Four works of the Iqiyi Fog Theater will be broadcast one after another. The first one is "The Fog of the Octagonal Pavilion" starring Duan Long and Hao Lei; Tencent Video has a number of IP costumes in stock, such as A Sword in the Snow and A Twin Cities in the Mirror, while Youku holds a large number of online dramas to be broadcast, such as The Story of Xingfu’s Ice Rain and Fire.
But for the fans, perhaps the involution of the series is a great blessing.
Squid Game, a Korean drama under Netflix filter.
The screen disappearance of the beautiful man in ancient costume
