Digitalization of Youku Long‑Video Content Supply Chain: Practices and Architecture

At the recently concluded 2020 Yunqi Conference “Smart Cultural Entertainment Industry Practice Forum”, Qian Kai, senior technical expert from Youku Technology Center’s Content Platform, shared the digital practice of Youku’s long‑video content supply chain.

The core of Youku’s long‑video business is to acquire large amounts of high‑quality content through purchase and self‑production, then distribute it via platform products. The platform consists of three major modules: content supply, content management, and content distribution. While content management and distribution have reached a relatively mature level of platformization, digitization and intelligence, the content‑supply side lags behind due to industry‑specific challenges.

Traditional Film & TV Production Process and Industry Characteristics

A TV drama production typically includes script creation, preparation, shooting, post‑production, and distribution. Each stage contains many sub‑tasks (e.g., team building, main‑creator selection, location scouting, editing, dubbing, special‑effects). A high‑quality drama often takes more than a year, involves over 20 steps, and costs more than 5 million RMB per episode. Hence the industry is characterized by non‑standard products, long production cycles, and large per‑project investment.

Challenges of Content Supply from Youku’s Perspective

Content‑supply problems frequently cause delays and quality issues. Historical data shows 66 % of projects are delayed and 34 % fail quality standards. Root causes include:

Heavy reliance on human experience for content evaluation, lacking a structured, systematic assessment system.

Production information is not online; project data lacks a unified format, making schedule assurance difficult.

The platform lacks a unified, continuous content strategy.

Digital Content Supply‑Chain System

To address these issues, Youku built a digital content supply‑chain system. Traditional industry digital transformation generally follows three stages: (1) structuring basic industry elements, (2) online‑izing business processes, and (3) digitizing operational strategies.

Youku’s solution is decomposed into three stages:

Establish a structured evaluation system for precise, end‑to‑end content‑production assessment.

Build an information‑based production‑management mechanism to strictly control content quality and schedule.

Create a unified content‑strategy linkage mechanism to achieve supply‑demand matching.

Content Supply‑Chain Construction Process

The structured content‑evaluation system consists of three layers: data layer, capability layer, and scenario layer. The data layer stores structured production‑element data; the capability layer builds single‑element and multi‑element evaluation capabilities; the scenario layer applies these capabilities to use cases such as project‑initiation evaluation, main‑creator matching, and final‑product acceptance.

Evaluation examples show scoring of individual elements (e.g., actors, screenwriters, directors) on metrics like audience favorability and fan value, then aggregating them into an overall project score with benchmark comparisons.

Technical solution for structured data production involves data acquisition, ETL processing, knowledge organization, knowledge fusion, and knowledge reasoning, yielding three data categories: basic element data, content‑understanding data, and quantitative metric data. Basic element data (director, screenwriter, lead actor, supplier, IP, etc.) are the most critical.

Entity processing flow example: external capture → ODPS cleaning & fusion → manual review → storage → OLAP engine for online service. The system can process over 500 billion records per day, accumulate 30 million entities and relationships, and achieve over 92 % entity‑fusion accuracy.

The evaluation engine combines:

A rule engine for single‑element scoring and multi‑element combination scoring.

AI technologies (computer vision, NLP, multimodal fusion) for script and video understanding.

Overall evaluation accuracy exceeds 80 %.

Step 2: Information‑Based Production Management

The core is to online‑ize information and processes. Core nodes (sourcing, initial screening, project initiation, signing, preparation, shooting, post‑production, review, delivery, scheduling, etc.) are all digitized, establishing a standardized management mechanism with notification and early‑warning systems. After full online implementation, more than 20 teams collaborate efficiently, and over 100 risk points are monitored.

Step 3: Unified Content Strategy Implementation

The goal is to avoid spending heavily on content that users do not accept. A user‑demand‑driven strategy linkage connects copyright, evaluation, operation, and self‑production studios, aligning goals across teams. Four strategies are defined: distribution, scheduling, reserve, and acquisition.

Reserve strategy calculates long‑term content‑reserve thickness to forecast 1–2 year supply needs. Scheduling strategy combines internal and external scheduling to provide platform‑water‑level alerts and short‑term supply forecasts. Together they enable the platform to understand overall supply demand, meeting long‑term needs via content layout (self‑production, custom, acquisition) and short‑term needs via quick tactics (series swaps, acquisitions).

Summary and Outlook

We have presented the full digital practice of Youku’s content supply chain, covering three pillars: structured content evaluation, information‑based production management, and digital content strategy. The system has been operational for six months, covering all drama projects, has halted more than ten risky projects, and saved over 100 million RMB in potential losses.

Looking ahead, digital transformation will become a major trend in the next decade, bringing huge technological dividends. We believe digitalization will fundamentally change upstream content production.

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