About DramaWave

DramaWave

DramaWave is the paid overseas short-drama platform of Kunlun Tech Co., Ltd. — Kunlun Wanwei — the Beijing-based internet and artificial-intelligence company listed in Shenzhen under code 300418. Launched in 2024 as the group's flagship vertical-drama app, DramaWave is published overseas by Skywork AI Pte. Ltd. of Singapore, Kunlun's overseas AI arm, and operates as the subscription-and-purchase counterpart to Kunlun's free app FreeReels. Together, Kunlun's interim reporting said, the two apps ranked first in monthly active users in the short-drama market outside China in the first half of 2026, and by mid-2026 DramaWave had completed what the company calls an AI-native transformation, with the large majority of its newly added content generated by AI.

Kunlun Tech, the parent company

Kunlun Tech is a Beijing-based, Shenzhen-listed internet and AI company whose businesses span overseas information distribution, social entertainment, gaming and, increasingly, artificial-intelligence products grouped under its Skywork AI brand. Its chairman is Zhou Yahui and Fang Han serves as chief executive in company reporting on the short-drama business. Kunlun entered the overseas short-drama market late compared with pioneers such as ReelShort and DramaBox — its flagship app arrived in 2024 — but it invested heavily, with trade reporting describing an investment of about 500 million dollars at the end of 2024 to enter the market, and it pivoted the business hard toward AI-generated content. By 2026 short dramas had become a central revenue driver: Kunlun's half-year report put AI short-drama platform revenue at 1.53 billion yuan in the first half of 2026, up 163.3 percent, at a gross margin of 67.5 percent, and the company announced in July 2026 that Skywork AI's annual recurring revenue had passed 800 million dollars, with more than 700 million dollars of that from the AI short-drama platform business.

Launch and positioning

DramaWave appeared on Google Play in September 2024, published by Skywork AI Pte. Ltd. It was positioned from the start as Kunlun's paid platform for international audiences, while FreeReels, released shortly afterwards, carried the free, advertising-supported offer. The pairing mirrors a common structure in the category — a free app maximising downloads and a paid app maximising revenue per viewer — but Kunlun runs both at unusual scale. AppBrain's store data recorded DramaWave passing 150 million installs on Google Play, with a rating of about 4.5 stars from more than 800,000 ratings, and a number-one ranking in the free entertainment chart in France among its country peaks. Its store description presents it as a next-generation HD streaming platform offering exclusive vertical television videos, series and movies.

How DramaWave works

DramaWave delivers vertical short dramas in the standard duanju form: episodes of about one to two minutes, series of dozens of episodes, and cliffhanger endings designed to pull the viewer forward. Access is sold through in-app purchases and subscriptions. Independent app guides checking the United States storefront in October 2026 listed weekly VIP options at 7.99 and 19.99 dollars and a monthly option at 36.99 dollars, noting that DramaWave's cheaper weekly tier undercut several rivals. Prices vary by market and change over time. The app is available on Android and iOS; unlike some competitors it has not centred its offer on a browser player, and guides list web viewing as not verified.

The catalogue mixes live-action dramas with AI-generated series, a blend examined in detail below. Genres follow the category's proven shelf — romance, revenge, CEO and identity-reversal plots, suspense and comeback stories — produced or acquired for markets outside China, with the United States and other English-speaking markets, Europe, Latin America and Southeast Asia all significant in the wider Kunlun business.

Scale: users, billings and group results

Kunlun's interim report for the first half of 2026, published on 19 August 2026, is the main primary source for DramaWave's scale. Citing Sensor Tower data, the company said DramaWave and FreeReels together ranked first in monthly active users in the short-drama market outside China during that half-year, and that monthly gross billings for the short-drama business passed 65 million dollars by the end of June 2026. Trade summaries of the same period put the two platforms' combined monthly active users above 80 million. Kunlun's group revenue for the half was 5.36 billion yuan, up 43.55 percent year on year, with about 97 percent earned overseas, according to summaries of the filing; the short-drama platform was identified as a primary driver of the AI business's recurring revenue.

Annualised figures underline the speed of growth. Market maps compiled from company announcements put the short-drama business's annual recurring revenue rising from about 120 million dollars in March 2025 to more than 570 million dollars in March 2026 and more than 700 million dollars by July 2026. Those are company-announced run-rates rather than audited segment revenue, but the audited direction is the same: the half-year filing's 163.3 percent growth in AI short-drama platform revenue was recorded at a gross margin of 67.5 percent, with other summaries of company reporting putting the segment's margin higher still in earlier periods.

The AI-native transformation

DramaWave's defining story is its conversion to AI-generated drama. Kunlun began producing AI-generated short dramas in 2025, building on its SkyReels video-generation models and its SkyProduction system. The company reported more than 1,000 AI-generated titles across DramaWave and FreeReels. Through 2026 the share climbed steeply: Kunlun said more than 80 percent of newly added content was AI-generated at the start of July 2026, and more than 90 percent of the episodes added during July 2026 were AI-generated, figures relayed in both company announcements and independent industry analyses. Kunlun describes DramaWave as having completed its AI-native transformation.

The technology stack behind that claim was built in public. In August 2024 Kunlun launched SkyReels — initially presented under the name SkyReels as the world's first AI short-drama platform for creators — integrating its SkyScript script model, StoryboardGen storyboard model, Sky3DGen 3D generation model and WorldEngine, which combines AI 3D engines with video models, to automate script generation, character customisation, storyboarding, dialogue, music and final synthesis. The consumer apps are the distribution end of that pipeline: models that generate a drama also fill the catalogue of the platform that sells it.

Live action alongside AI

Kunlun has been careful, in its own statements, not to present AI as a total replacement for filmed drama. Reporting by MIT Technology Review, summarised in independent platform guides, records that the company offers more than 1,000 AI titles while its chief executive said it would not stop investing in dramas with real actors, with AI intended to reach a substantial minority share of the overall platform catalogue even as it dominates new additions. DramaWave's catalogue is therefore best described as mixed: AI-generated series supply volume and rapid localisation, while live-action productions — the format on which the category was built — continue alongside them. For viewers, individual series should be judged as one or the other, because the platform carries both.

Regulatory and market context

DramaWave operates in a market whose rules are still catching up with it. Industry analyses in 2026 noted that none of the eight main overseas micro-drama apps checked — including DramaWave — appeared on Ofcom's list of notified on-demand services in the United Kingdom or in the European Audiovisual Observatory's MAVISE database, a reflection of services operating outside those jurisdictions rather than a legal finding. The one concrete enforcement action those analyses found involving the app was an advertising ruling: the United Kingdom's Advertising Standards Authority banned a DramaWave advertisement seen in the Vinted app as likely to cause serious and widespread offence and as irresponsibly targeted. The episode illustrates the scrutiny now applied to micro-drama marketing as the format mainstreams.

At the market level, DataEye estimates cited in industry reporting put in-app purchase revenue for micro-drama apps outside China at about 1.27 billion dollars in the first half of 2026, with Chinese-origin apps taking about 93 percent of it. DramaWave, as Kunlun's paid flagship, is one of the principal beneficiaries of that concentration.

Availability and place in the Kunlun group

DramaWave is available on Android and iOS outside China, published by Skywork AI Pte. Ltd., with subscription and in-app purchase pricing that varies by market. Within Kunlun Tech it sits beside FreeReels as one half of a two-app system, and beneath Skywork AI, whose product matrix also includes the Skywork productivity tools, the Mureka music-generation model and the SkyReels generation models. Filed under Beijing, Kunlun Tech's home city, DramaWave represents the most aggressive version of a proposition now common among Chinese technology companies: that the future of the short drama China invented lies in generating it with AI and selling it to the world.