Design and Platformization of Bilibili's Paid Exclusive Video and Short Drama Services

Background: The interaction between UP hosts and fans on Bilibili has become increasingly diversified. Bilibili introduced “charging exclusive video” – a paid‑video service that allows creators to produce special content for users who support them through the platform’s “charging” feature.

Charging exclusive video is not merely a one‑way content delivery; it serves as a bridge for deeper creator‑fan interaction, enabling creators to understand fan needs while rewarding supporters with exclusive material.

The service supports a variety of content formats, including ordinary UGC videos, interactive videos, joint submissions, and e‑commerce videos, all of which can be enabled with the charging function.

Since its formal launch in 2023, the number of charging exclusive video submissions, the number of charging users, and the associated revenue have grown rapidly, forming a sizable business segment.

Short drama (微短剧) entered the public eye in 2023, attracting massive traffic with fast‑paced, high‑impact content. To ensure compliant operation, Bilibili established a short‑drama operation management specification that requires creators to pass qualification and content‑review checks before publishing.

From a technical perspective, building an efficient and stable platform to support both charging exclusive videos and short dramas presents a significant challenge due to the need for rapid iteration and diverse business requirements.

Current Situation and Problems: The manuscript (稿件) system, a core Bilibili business, has experienced unprecedented growth in creator numbers and business forms, leading to increased system load, higher complexity, and accumulated technical debt caused by tightly coupled modules and ambiguous early‑stage business boundaries.

Problem Analysis: With over thirty downstream business parties sharing limited compute, storage, and human resources, the platform must balance standardization (for maintainability) with customization (to meet specific business needs).

Platformization Direction: The solution is to evolve the manuscript system toward a platform‑based architecture, modularizing components, clearly separating business domains, and driving data‑driven fine‑grained operations.

Platform Architecture: The platform adopts a modular design that isolates business domains (manuscript, video, charging, short drama) and provides a unified service layer. Diagrams in the original material illustrate the end‑to‑end application scenarios and the overall business architecture.

Platform Capabilities – Manuscript Dimension: collection, batch upload, draft management, scheduled release, charging, etc. Video Dimension: multi‑part (multi‑P) support, transcoding priority control, preview streams, transcoding time estimation, watermark processing, and more.

Data Model: Each manuscript container holds video data, textual description, and interaction data. Three key roles interact with the system – creators (UP hosts), reviewers, and ordinary users – each contributing to content creation, compliance, and engagement.

Attribute Bits: Bit‑level flags indicate special properties such as 360° video, charging status, short‑drama classification, etc.

Interaction Model: Using domain‑driven design, the B‑side (creator portal) submits manuscripts, which are then propagated via messaging to the C‑side (consumption services). Charging information is synchronized to a dedicated charging service, and playback permissions are enforced by that service, ensuring consistent and low‑latency user experience.

Observability Construction: Real‑time monitoring of key stages (submission, transcoding, review, release) is performed with 5‑minute interval metrics, historical comparisons, and alert rules for abnormal drops or deviations. New‑type manuscripts (charging videos, short dramas) have been added to the monitoring scope.

Stability Construction: RPC interfaces with retry and fallback mechanisms guarantee data consistency for charging information. SLA‑driven stability improvements address timeout issues, slow database queries, and upstream/downstream latency, achieving high availability for critical interfaces.

Outlook: By addressing historical technical debt and high coupling through platformization, the system gains flexibility, scalability, and observability, better supporting existing and future business lines such as classrooms and e‑commerce. Future work aims to further optimize solutions and expand the platform to accommodate more diversified services.