(Yicai Global) Oct. 21 -- ByteDance Technology, the Chinese owner of short-video app TikTok, plans to invest at least CNY2 billion (USD300 million) next year to encourage the creation of medium-length video content for its iXigua platform, according to the unit’s president.

IXigua will boost spending on production tools for mid-length video content, online traffic related to original content and financial support, Ren Lifeng said at a press conference yesterday. The Chinese market for such content has grown very fast over the past year, with video-sharing platform Bilibili doing well, Ren said.

During this year’s coronavirus pandemic, video uploaders on Bilibili provided timely information to users about the outbreak, with online anti-epidemic videos viewed more than 5 billion times. The number of Bilibili’s monthly active users surged to 172 million in the second quarter, many of them young people. Bilibili is now the platform with the most study-related videos in China.

Citing iXigua’s own data, Ren said the total time Chinese users spend watching medium-length videos each day is more than half of that for short videos, and twice as much as the time spent on long clips. And that figure is rising fast.

A number of platforms are now increasing their investment in medium-length videos. Twitter-like Weibo launched a video account plan in July, and announced this month that the number of registered video accounts exceeded 500,000 in just two months. Video accounts with at least 1 million followers topped 5,000 during the period and is projected to reach 10,000 by the end of the year.

China’s ubiquitous super-app WeChat introduced an upload feature for videos longer than a minute in September, while search engine giant Baidu debuted its own video app Baidu Kankan this month. Question-and-answer site Zhihu has also added a new video section.

IXigua’s content will differ from that of TikTok, which is known as Douyin in China. Douyin focuses more on user-generated content, with users at the core, while iXigua values professional-generated content more, Ren told Yicai Global.

IXigua and Douyin will also generate synergy that is both linked and differentiated, with Douyin supplying the function that allows users to play clips in landscape mode and iXigua joining hands with Douyin and video-editing app Jianying to debut editing tools for medium-length content.

Ren also revealed that Zhang Yiming, the founder and chief executive of ByteDance, has not put any pressure on iXigua over profits.

Editors: Liao Shumin, Peter Thomas