Research on the Impact of Content Miniaturization in the Film and Television Industry on Traditional Capital Operations

Abstract

In the media environment where mobile internet has deeply penetrated and fragmented content consumption by the audience has become the mainstream, short dramas have achieved explosive growth thanks to their characteristic of "micro-sized content" (single episode duration ranging from 1 to 10 minutes, highly condensed narrative, and production cycle compressed to within several months). In 2024, the total online viewership exceeded 10 billion times. Their "short, simple, and fast" content production logic and multi-channel dissemination form are in stark contrast to the traditional film and long drama-based media and entertainment industry. For a long time, traditional film and television capital operations have followed a slow-paced model of "large-scale capital investment, long production and polishing period, and single copyright/box office channel recovery". This model not only has limitations such as high capital threshold and low turnover efficiency, but also faces the industry pain point of weak risk resistance. Meanwhile, the rapid development of short dramas not only strongly impacts this traditional model but also forces traditional film and television capital to actively adapt - by adjusting the investment layout of "light and heavy assets combination", optimizing the fast-paced content production process, innovating the profit mechanism of platform sharing and e-commerce linkage, and introducing data-driven precise decision-making methods to adapt to the new trend. This transformation not only injects new vitality into traditional film and television capital but also promotes the capital logic of the film and television industry to shift from "scale priority" to "efficiency priority", opening up efficient and diverse high-quality development paths for the industry in the media transformation.