Written by丨Rosy
Edited丨Mei Qi
Entertainment Value Official Interpretation:
ID:wenyujiazhiguan
“I originally thought this would be a conference with a very high professional threshold. But when I got to the venue, I found that the attendees were quite diverse, and the atmosphere was young and enthusiastic—it's been a long time since the industry had such lively and exciting scenes.” Director Cui Yi, who has taken part in the production of documentaries such as (Aerial China) and (Eight Hundred Years of the State of Chu), has now shifted into AI content creation. He shared his genuine impressions with the Entertainment Value Official.
On the afternoon of August 20, more than 2,000 creators—representing major labels, small-and-medium teams, and individual identities—gathered at the iQIYI Creators Conference at the Beijing International Convention Center. The Entertainment Value Official invited several frontline practitioners to take part, including Cui Yi, a former documentary director who has transitioned to AI creation, and Miao Sen, a creator of manhua-style dramas. At the scene, several creators stood at the user end and shared the difficulties they encounter in everyday creation, and also expressed what kind of support they hope the platform can provide.
This year marks a key turning point as the AI wave sweeps through the content industry. AI content creation is experiencing explosive growth, but creators are also facing many real challenges: the technical barrier is rising, monetization paths are unclear, and their rights and interests are not sufficiently protected. At this conference, more than 2,000 passionate AI creators sat in the audience, hoping that many of their creative problems could be solved and looking forward to greater creative returns and a more valuable creative path.
Nadu Pro enables creators
Having its own film and TV industrialization tool
Most creators came to the conference first out of curiosity. Zhang Yong, founder of Julang Film and Television, and Peng Lu, who transitioned from traditional media to AI creation, both told Wenyu Value Officer that they did not know what kind of reserves and advantages iQIYI might have in terms of tools, technology, and asset libraries, and they also were not sure what help a top long-video platform like iQIYI could bring to AI creators. “AIGC already has so many choices—why should we choose iQIYI and Nadu Pro?” Zhang Yong asked before the conference began.
What participating creators cared about first was whether the creative tools were truly easy to use. Many practitioners deeply involved in AI film and TV creation have encountered the same problem: they understand story, script, and cinematic storytelling, but get stuck by technical tools. Traditional AI tools cannot precisely control lighting, shot scheduling, character expressions, and visual continuity, and the generated content often suffers from obvious flaws, logical confusion, and fragmented scenes. To fix one detail bug, creators have to generate repeatedly and keep rerolling, consuming a huge amount of time, computing power, and labor costs, yet the final output still fails to meet film and TV broadcast standards. AI seems to speed things up on the surface, but in reality it greatly increases ineffective costs.
This is also the most fundamental difference between iQIYI’s Nadu Pro and ordinary AI tools on the market. Nadu Pro’s advantage is not “one-click content generation,” but turning the entire professional film and TV industrial workflow into an AI toolbox that ordinary people can use and professional teams find useful. Over the past three months, Nadu Pro has completed more than 200 iterations in functions and capabilities, and now has core film-level capabilities such as controllable lighting, controllable scheduling, and controllable performance.
Unlike single-function AI tools, Nadu Pro can handle the core stages of film and TV content creation, from early script refinement and storyboard design, to mid-stage shot scheduling, visual rendering, and digital asset set dressing, and then to post-production editing correction and continuity checking. For creators, this means finally saying goodbye to the awkward situation of “understanding creativity but not being able to control the visuals, understanding the script but not being able to direct the shots.”
For beginner creators, there is no need to study complex technical parameters or spend a lot of computing power repeatedly trial-and-error. They only need to enter their own ideas and story requirements to complete standardized creation, truly achieving “one person as an army, making film and TV content from zero foundation”; for experienced film and TV professionals like Cui Yi and professional teams like Julang Film and Television, Nadu Pro’s controllable capabilities can accurately realize creators’ shot language and narrative style, turning AI from a “content generator” into a “creativity amplifier,” allowing creators’ energy to return to the story itself.
Fill the gap in industry services
Creators have a complete growth system
If Nadu Pro solves the core problem of “how to produce content at high quality,” then iQIYI’s full creator service system solves the industry’s long-standing real pain points: no one teaches creation, projects lack resources, works struggle to break out, and after finishing, creators don’t know how to distribute and monetize.
In today’s AIGC track, the vast majority of tool platforms focus only on the generation stage, leaving the follow-up training, project incubation, and distribution/operations after the work is produced entirely to creators to figure out on their own. Newcomers do not know how to refine AI materials into qualified film and TV content; teams with good projects cannot find capital or exposure channels; and after finally completing a finished piece, they still do not understand platform distribution rules, so quality works are buried in the flood of content. Many creators have ideas in hand, yet get stuck in the middle stage between “making it” and “getting it out there.”
Now, there is a complete growth channel from newcomer cultivation, project incubation, and premium content upgrading to distribution and operations.
The AI film and TV creation camp for newcomers serves as the starting point for talent incubation. Unlike scattered tutorials online, the camp is led by first-line industry mentors and takes into account film and TV narrative logic, practical AI tool use, and copyright compliance, following a hands-on teaching approach. New creators complete a full training cycle here, from idea conception to finished output, crossing the threshold of “being able to generate visuals, but not being able to tell a story,” and moving directly from hobbyist to professional AI creator.
Once creators have refined a feature-length project with commercial potential, they can connect with the Nadu AIGC Venture Conference. The venture conference is aimed at mature teams and complete projects and is held regularly every year, addressing the common difficulties faced by small and medium-sized teams, such as lack of funding, lack of resources, and lack of industry connection channels, so that promising AI feature-length projects have a chance to be realized.
If creators aspire to make AIGC commercial feature films, Baudoui · iQIYI Film Theater is the perfect place. It is a benchmark incubation base for AIGC commercial films, with veteran filmmaker Peter Pau involved in guidance, selecting high-quality AI feature-length projects and helping creators upgrade work quality and break through in personal IP.
After the project is refined, the iQIYI account takes over the closed loop of distribution and operations. It is deeply integrated with Nadu Pro, allowing creators to publish directly to their iQIYI account with one click after finishing production in Nadu Pro, without repeatedly exporting and transcoding across platforms. The account backend includes a full set of operational capabilities. Creators can manage all their works here, view playback and conversion data, independently operate their fans, and directly connect their works to iQIYI’s massive user pool. Revenue sharing and incentive settlements are all completed within this system, eliminating the need to connect to multiple platforms and reducing the overall cost of operations.
Under this system, newcomers can learn and grow, projects can receive resource support, premium works can gain industry recognition, works can complete distribution and operations, and creators can go through the full creative cycle.
But even so, all kinds of sudden problems can still arise at any time during the creative process: newcomers hit bottlenecks in tool operation, teams encounter technical adaptation issues in customized projects, and questions arise in uploading, revenue sharing, and copyright stages. Most AI tools on the market stop responding after product delivery; when problems occur, creators can only search for information and keep trial-and-erroring on their own, which easily disrupts the creative rhythm.
iQIYI uses a dedicated customer service system as a safety net. It can solve any problem in the creative process. Zero-based creators who encounter problems with tool operation, material use, or upload procedures can seek help from customer service at any time without having to search for scattered tutorials themselves; mature teams that encounter special technical demands in customized content production can also receive targeted feedback and guidance.
This customer service system ensures that creators have a place to ask for help whenever they hit a bottleneck at any stage. Zhang Yong, founder of Julang Film and Television, told Wenyu Value Officer that the customer service system makes the platform more humane than similar platforms, and it is an important factor attracting him to create on iQIYI.
End monetization anxiety
Let every creator’s input be rewarded
Creators are willing to gather around the platform because tools are only the foundation, services are the protection mechanism, and clear, transparent, and practical revenue policies are the real core attraction.
In Wenyu Value Officer’s view, the core signal released by iQIYI at this conference is to completely end the monetization anxiety of AI creators and make “creating can earn money, good content earns more money” a reality. iQIYI Senior Vice President Yang Haitao made the commercialization logic clear on site in a straightforward and sincere way: layered operations to fit creators of all scales, transparent revenue sharing to eliminate backroom manipulation, and multiple tracks to broaden monetization paths, so that new creators can get started smoothly and experienced creators can keep going deeper.
The platform first greatly lowers the entry threshold for quality content, giving ordinary creators the chance to participate in creation and commercialization. Miao Sen, who has some experience in AI animated drama production and has already participated in the production of two projects, Hanhan Theater and Mijiang Mantui, told Wenyu Value Officer that after seeing iQIYI’s animation track upgrade to the “Galaxy AI Anime Plan 2.0,” as long as a work meets the requirements of 3 minutes per episode and 120 minutes total duration, it can participate in revenue sharing. At the conference, Miao Sen eagerly shared this good news with his teammates.
Second is a highly competitive tiered revenue-sharing policy that maximizes benefits for creators. For no-guarantee AI mid-length dramas, the platform implements tiered revenue sharing based on revenue, with top-quality content able to receive up to 130% revenue share; original animation and comic-drama content enjoys 1.2x high-sharing support; and AI mid-length dramas and children’s AI content launched during specific periods can all enjoy exclusive revenue-sharing bonuses. At the same time, the platform completely breaks down content-format barriers, unifying revenue rules for live-action short dramas, AI short dramas, and comic dramas. Exclusive creators can enjoy 100% full revenue sharing, while non-exclusive content receives a stable 70% share. The revenue rules are open, transparent, and clearly verifiable, completely saying goodbye to traffic mysticism.
In addition, iQIYI has launched a substantial cash incentive policy to strongly support premium creation: high-quality no-guarantee mid-length dramas can receive up to 5 million yuan in cash rewards, works with million-level revenue sharing can extend the revenue-sharing period by 6 months, premium short-drama brands can receive up to 3 million yuan in special support, and a single premium short drama can receive up to 1 million yuan in rewards.
Many creators on site told Wenyu Value Officer that iQIYI’s core appeal is not short-term traffic subsidies, but a stable, transparent, long-term path to earning money. The platform does not ask creators to adapt to rules or cater to traffic; instead, it actively adapts to creators, using a low-threshold, high-revenue-share, reward-heavy model so that every creative investment can receive an equivalent return.
More than two thousand creators came to this conference, and more than twenty thousand creators are rooted in the iQIYI ecosystem, reflecting an industry-wide awakening: AI creation should not be low-cost, low-return mass-production churn, and creators should not be trapped in the predicament of “working hard to create, yet getting nowhere.”
The industry is looking for a new possibility: AI can support high-quality narrative works, and creators do not need to struggle with tools while worrying about monetization. When tool capabilities, service systems, and commercial returns are all connected, creators can escape cutthroat competition and truly return to the act of storytelling itself.