By Beatriz Garcia
SAO PAULO (Reuters) – With scripted productions and low budgets, soap operas and two-minute series are entertainment formats that have increasingly attracted users of Kwai, a Chinese application for creating and sharing short videos that arrived in Brazil in late 2019, during the pre-pandemic explosion of these entertainment formats.
The theme of telenovelas is very strong in Brazil and throughout Latin America. Kwai’s parent company, Kuaishou, also has a branch of producing similar content in China and has managed to adapt to the Brazilian market, where it has more than 45 million monthly active users.
Called TeleKwai, the feature focuses on creating dramaturgy in vertical format on the cell phone, in episodes of up to two minutes.
The platform does not directly produce the content, but works in some productions as a co-producer, in addition to offering recruitment, training programs, creation labs and script for content creators. “It is a work of scale and a lot of interaction”, said Mariana Sensini, director general of Kwai Brasil, without giving details about investment in the product.
The application carried out the first tests of the service in Brazil at the beginning of the year and in April it already had more than 100 accounts frequently producing content for the format. There are currently 180 accounts producing weekly, with the videos totaling more than 5.4 billion views in six months, according to company data provided to Reuters.
“A small production company can make a production without huge investment and have a very high visibility”, said Sensini.
DEMOGRAPHIC FACTORS
Kwai claims to currently have 45.7 million monthly active users in Brazil, who access the application, on average, for 60 minutes a day, compared to 30 minutes in January, when the first tests of TeleKwai had not yet begun.
According to the company, the success of telenovelas was also due to demographic factors, with 54% of Kwai users being over 35 years old and 35% over 45 years old. This audience, according to the company, already watched soap operas on television.
“We are not focused on some niches and urban centers and that makes the app give visibility to different types of creators, not just for a specific aesthetic or type of content”, says Sensini.
