On August 31st, the mythological series "After the Journey to the West" Season 1, featuring the Flower Fruit Mountain chapter, premiered on Hunan TV and Mango TV. This series, produced by Mango TV, created by the AIGC Innovation Content Center, and distributed by Bojing Culture, is the first work to adopt a parallel review and broadcasting model after the release of the 21 regulations by the State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television. It also marks the first time an AI long drama has appeared on satellite television. The market has already shown its support with consecutive two-day涨停 (limit-up) in the stock price of Mango Media. The popularity continues; at the Mango Co-Creation Ecosystem Conference on September 17th, Ren Xu, General Manager of the AIGC Innovation Content Center, announced that the War Heaven Chapter (Episodes 6-10) of "After the Journey to the West" will be released during this year's National Day holiday.
Surrounding this show, Mango's layout in AIGC has become clear, which can be summarized into three areas: production, brand, and creation platform, covering the entire supply chain from production to distribution. At the conference, Mango Media launched Lingchuang Theater, positioning it as a premium content brand for AIGC under Mango. It plans three tracks: high-quality female-targeted mid-length dramas, national style classic IP, and children's animation, and announced collaboration with outstanding creators and leading film companies. Meanwhile, the AIGC platform Mango Lingchuang, based on the Mango Large Model, once again came to the forefront. Lu Haibo, Vice President and CTO of Mango TV, stated that this platform has reached international leading standards in professional film and television creation. "After the Journey to the West" is a test of its capabilities, and in the future, it will open up a technical product ecosystem to involve more people.
Why "After the Journey to the West"? Ren Xu's answer reveals Mango's unique logic. At present, a lot of AIGC content is male-oriented, but Mango has a large number of female users, so she chose to create female-targeted content and developed "Women Return", combining characters like Hua Mulan, Mu Guiying, and Fan Lihua into a female hero universe IP. In her view, Mango's starting point for AIGC is not technology but content. The platform is rooted in content, so the approach is to use content to make AI, rather than using AI to make content.
This path has been laid out early on. Since 2018, Mango has been making efforts in the field of artificial intelligence algorithms and developing multi-modal models through the Malaanshan Cup International Audio-Visual Algorithm Competition to recruit top technical talents. In 2024, they built the Mango Large Model, and in 2025, they constructed the Mango Lingchuang AIGC creation platform on it. In 2024, the preliminary team Prism Studio experimented with AIGC content, and in early 2025, they established the AIGC First-Level Center. It has grown step by step along the technical foundation. Ren Xu explained the difference clearly: other platforms use AI to create content, while Mango uses content to create AI. Because Hunan Radio and Television itself is a content creative company, with content and needs for evolution, the platform naturally accumulates and grows.
In the content market, Mango has set three differentiated directions. On the children's animation side, they launched their own IP "Gulu Bi Office" and co-created projects "Puzhu Xianzhi Kunsui Jiyan" and built their own AI music children's song brand "Mango Miaomiao Children's Songs." On the national style classic IP side, starting with "After the Journey to the West," they are promoting works such as "Soshen" and "The Life of Xinzhui," and building a female hero universe. On the female-targeted side, they systematically refine works like "Shili Fangfei" and "Feise," where "Fengqi Linglonggu" and "Chengfeng" are the first strategic-level works of simulated live-action long dramas, directly targeting S-level live-action drama standards. They comprehensively apply simulation-level generation in visual effects, narrative rhythm, and character logic. In the future, Mango will integrate PUGC mode and open up self-owned IP cooperation. The concept of second creation AI has already had examples: the derivative interactive comic drama "Daylight Reverse" of the variety show "Busy Searching for Treasures" was jointly created with the production team before its release, and clues can circulate between the two contents.
Commercialization, considered the hardest problem in the industry, Ren Xu does not call it money-losing. She emphasized that Mango plays a dual前锋 (frontline) with content and technology, and the soil is different: content itself has value for membership fees and derivative payments, and revenue-sharing is already there. Advertising sectors, such as automotive and pharmaceutical industries, have already entered for trials. A more distant goal is to promote production mechanism and structural changes, allowing the industry to use AI, reduce costs, and ultimately bring Mango Lingchuang to the market. This platform is integrative, including both self-developed models and external latest models. Due to its deep expertise in film and television, it can receive new versions of mainstream models earlier. After being developed in 2025, it has been fully opened to the market.
The moat of the Mango Large Model lies in its foundation. Ren Xu pointed out that Mango itself is content, and although technology started in 2018, content has accumulated over 20 years of variety shows, dramas, and scripts, with dozens of PBs of self-owned copyright content and directors' creative methods. These barriers are not open-sourced. On top of the foundation, many optimizations were made. For example, using general models for ancient costumes often results in poor lighting and distorted patterns, but after fine-tuning, the effect has greatly improved, making it especially suitable for historical, xianxia, and fantasy genres. Many handy toolkits were also developed. Drawing a line, an arrow, or adjusting the angle of a 3D camera can generate specific images. Canvas, 3D camera, and image fusion are the most praised functions among creation colleagues. More importantly, it is an integrated film and television collaboration platform: scripts are input, AI sorts out storyboards, directors select and assign to team members for production. The whole process is smooth. "After the Journey to the West" further combines single-point tools into project-level production flow, supported by computing power, models, and cloud pipelines for character design, storyboarding, shot production, and post-production. The platform's challenge has shifted from whether it can generate a good shot to whether it can enable nearly 100 people to collaborate stably around the same aesthetics and progress.
The efficiency improvement is visible. Traditional 3D animation requires 10-15 people or even dozens of people to refine for 5 minutes, costing 50-600,000 yuan. With AIGC, personnel costs have significantly dropped, and a super team with animation and director thinking can produce a episode within a week, with costs as low as a few thousand yuan per minute. Even more extreme: buying an IP for a 10-minute episode, 26 episodes, from planning to launch takes one and a half years, costing 8-90,000 yuan per minute, with a total investment exceeding ten million. While Cluebie's long animation was planned in April and launched in summer, completed in two to three months, with costs only one-tenth of the original, efficiency increased five to ten times, and the team was reduced from 20 to 5 people. From IP development to presentation, the fastest used to take one and a half years, now it only takes three to four months.
When applying to major S-level programs, Mango chooses IPs that combine better with AIGC, such as "The Great Detective" is more suitable than "The Romantic Travel of a Wife," and prefers historical, xianxia, fantasy, and sci-fi over realism. The integration starts with small sections, without involving the main plot, first doing derivatives, gradually establishing a standardized process from script discussion to double-review mechanism. There is no AI anxiety internally. Ren Xu said everyone is very excited every day because it's clear that creativity is the core and AI is just a tool. In training camps, colleagues spontaneously want to learn, and even play with AI for an hour after work. Since 2018, internal embedded intelligent erasure, intelligent editing, AI voice-over, and multilingual translation capabilities have saved the company tens of millions in costs.
Facing the impact of short-form videos on long-form dramas in recent years, Ren Xu believes this evolution is natural. At first, AI wasn't mature enough to handle long content, so small teams started with segments. Now, with the integration of technology into high-quality content, long-form dramas and even AI films will emerge. Regarding Hongguo's plan to focus on AI long-form dramas and bring them to theaters, she judges that user bases are not completely overlapping, and the content created by different platform genes will also differ. For long video platforms, AIGC is actually a new opportunity - cost disruption, restructuring of production relations, and innovation in content forms, which is an important step in driving change in long video.
