About ShortMax

ShortMax

ShortMax is the overseas short-drama streaming platform of Jiaxing Jiuzhou Culture Media Co., Ltd., known in English as Jiuzhou Culture, a company founded in 2021 in Jiaxing, Zhejiang Province, China. Launched in June 2023 and also distributed under the name ShortTV, ShortMax carries vertical micro-dramas — series of roughly one-minute episodes — to audiences in more than 240 countries and regions. Within a year of launch it reported daily active users above 5.5 million, and later company statements put its monthly active users at a peak above 30 million, placing it among the leading Chinese-owned platforms in the global duanju export business.

Jiuzhou Culture and its founder

Jiuzhou Culture was founded in 2021 in Jiaxing, in Zhejiang Province. Its founder and chairman is Wang Jiacheng. The company built its business in China's domestic micro-drama industry before expanding overseas, and its executives have been among the most quoted Chinese voices on the internationalisation of the format. Wang has described the overseas market as replicating the early stages of China's own micro-drama development, estimating in a 2025 interview that, on a scale of one to ten, the overseas market stood at about stage four to five while China's domestic market had reached stage seven to nine. That framing — a mature home industry exporting to younger markets abroad — explains the company's strategy of moving production, translation and localised originals offshore at speed.

He Zexi, Jiuzhou's director of overseas operations, made the same point in commercial terms in earlier trade coverage, arguing that micro-dramas could rival conventional streaming because they combine subscriptions with pay-per-view episode purchases rather than relying on subscriptions alone, and saying the company believed one of the Chinese platforms would grow into a service comparable in scale to Netflix. Those are executive opinions rather than results, but they document how deliberately Jiuzhou positioned ShortMax as a global platform rather than a side project.

Launch and early growth

Trade coverage reported that ShortMax was founded in June 2023. The growth that followed was rapid by any measure. Within one year the platform had expanded to more than 240 countries and regions, and its daily active users had surpassed 5.5 million. Revenue reported in industry coverage rose from about 10 million dollars in February 2024 to nearly 30 million dollars by August 2024. Later statements raised the picture further: China Culture reporting in November 2025 said the app had a presence in over 200 countries and regions with monthly active users peaking at over 30 million, while Wang Jiacheng told Chinese state media coverage that the overseas platform covered more than 230 countries and regions with cumulative downloads above 100 million. The figures come from different dates and sources, and none is an audited filing, but together they trace a consistent trajectory from launch to top-tier scale in under two years.

The app is published in the stores by ShortMax Limited and keeps a listing that was still being updated in late October 2026. Its official website is shorttv.live, reflecting the ShortTV name under which the service is also distributed.

What the service offers

ShortMax is a mobile streaming app for short dramas, reels and television-style vertical video. Its store listing advertises access to more than 50,000 trending short dramas and movies in 19 languages, with multilingual subtitles and professional dubbing. Episodes deliver, in the listing's own words, a twist in about one minute, following the standard duanju construction of short instalments and constant cliffhangers. The catalogue draws on series from around the world, including American, Korean, Chinese and Japanese productions, mixing localised American dramas with popular Asian series.

The genre shelf named in the listing is broad and formula-driven, as is typical of the category: contemporary romance, CEO secrets, fated werewolf romance, payback and revenge stories, rise-and-revenge arcs, mafia drama, time travel, rebirth, secret identity, hidden marriage, contract marriage and marriage-before-love stories. Named hits in Chinese state-media coverage of the company include Forbidden Desires — Alpha's Love, Chasing My Frozen Wife, Too Late to Regret, Ex-Hubby, Return of Invincible Commander and Awesome Dad — titles that illustrate the platform's reliance on high-concept romance and reversal plots adapted for international viewers.

Monetisation: free viewing plus advertising

ShortMax's executives and industry profiles describe its model as free-plus-advertising at its core, distinguishing it from rivals built mainly on coin purchases. Industry market maps summarise the positioning in the same way: an early global short-drama platform monetised free with ads, holding a large user base in markets including Indonesia, the United States, Brazil and Japan. In practice the category's hybrid pattern applies — free access draws the audience, advertising carries much of the viewing, and in-app purchase options sit alongside — but Jiuzhou's own emphasis, repeated across profiles, is that the free, ad-supported route let ShortMax scale downloads faster in price-sensitive emerging markets than a paywall-first model would have allowed.

Jiuzhou staff have also been candid about the cost side. He Zexi told KrASIA that spending on social media platforms — Meta, Google and TikTok — to drive traffic to the apps is the largest cost for producers, and Chinese media reported that some studios could spend up to 80 percent of the recharge amount on traffic advertising. That economics lesson, keeping acquisition costs below the value of a retained viewer, is the central commercial discipline of the whole overseas micro-drama sector, and ShortMax's free model makes it especially important.

Content strategy in three stages

ShortMax executives describe a three-stage content strategy. The first stage adapted Chinese web-novel stories and existing Chinese dramas for overseas audiences through translation and dubbing. The second stage moved to localising overseas novels — taking stories originating in target markets and producing them as short dramas. The third stage is original scripts written for those markets from the start. The company supports that progression with an in-house production unit known as Studio 61, named in trade coverage as its internal studio for original work.

Production geography followed the same outward path. Wang Jiacheng told Chinese coverage that within two years the company had established short-drama production bases in North America, Japan, Vietnam and other places, launching about 30 locally self-made dramas a month. A converted film-and-television base described in the same reporting — built from a former auto-parts factory, with exterior blocks constructed in different architectural styles for overseas stories — shows the industrial scale at which Jiuzhou approached localised production for export markets.

Translation, AI and production speed

Localisation speed is a recurring theme in reporting on Jiuzhou. Liu Jinlong, head of the company's overseas platform, explained that conventional localisation — removing subtitles, translating and re-versioning a finished Chinese drama — could take more than half a month, too slow when more than ten Chinese short dramas a day were being launched across markets such as Thailand, Japan and the United States. After the Spring Festival period covered in the reporting, the team applied artificial intelligence to the pipeline and cut the turnaround to within a week, enabling simultaneous release in 14 countries and language regions in the following month. Scripts themselves were also exported: story frames and outlines laid out in China were filled in by local creative teams, combining Chinese serial-writing craft with local casting and settings.

ShortMax in the wider market

Chinese and international coverage routinely groups ShortMax with ReelShort and DramaBox as the leading Chinese micro-drama platforms overseas. CCTV Finance reporting relayed by Jiemian in January 2025 noted that exporting micro-dramas had become a recognised trend in China's cultural industry, with the United States the largest overseas revenue market, and cited ShortMax's more than 30 million monthly active users and its tailoring of content to local tastes in multiple regions. China Daily's cultural coverage likewise listed ShortMax among the apps — with DramaBox, GoodShort and ReelShort — that collectively built a user base of more than 150 million monthly active users for vertical short films. A United States data report cited in the same period counted more than 100 Chinese short-drama applications launched in overseas markets, underlining that ShortMax's scale was achieved inside a crowded, fast-moving field.

Availability and access

ShortMax is available on Android and iOS through the app stores, published by ShortMax Limited, with its official site at shorttv.live. It offers multilingual subtitles and professional dubbing across 19 languages, and its catalogue spans American, Korean, Chinese and Japanese series alongside localised productions from its overseas bases. Filed under its home city of Jiaxing, where Jiuzhou Culture was founded in 2021 and remains headquartered, ShortMax stands as one of the clearest examples of a Chinese regional media company building a genuinely global streaming audience on the micro-drama format.