TV Stations Ride the AI Compute Procurement Wave as Beijing Radio and Television Station Buys 3 Million Yuan of Seedance Tokens from Volcano Engine

By Entertainment Capital, Author: James

Two months ago, when Entertainment Capital was reviewing the battle over satellite TV landing fees, it also noted that Gansu Satellite TV, due to reduced financial support and pressure on its own operations, had suspended cable television network landing in the four provinces of Heilongjiang, Jiangsu, Guangdong, and Guangxi; Shaanxi Broadcasting Network was even ordered by a court of first instance to pay 70.19 million yuan for overdue encrypted signal fees for CCTV channels 3, 5, 6, 8, and 16; and Xingkong Satellite TV also went dark in May 2026. Which technical suppliers, then, are jointly supporting the new infrastructure landscape of broadcasting AI?

But if one opens the government procurement websites and public resource trading platforms of various localities, one sees another set of accounts showing that the broadcasting system "dares to spend."

Entertainment Capital's tally of recent bidding and tendering records from 259 broadcasting, converged media, and cultural tourism units nationwide found that, among 144 deduplicated records, there were at least 12 key projects involving converged media technology foundations and digital-intelligent upgrades, with total procurement amounts of 92.2849 million yuan, of which 7 projects with a relatively high "AI" concept content in the announcement documents totaled 17.3486 million yuan.

The most eye-catching order came from the procurement of "tokens."

According to a contract announcement published on the Beijing municipal government procurement website in October 2026 and an earlier transaction result announcement on the Beijing public resource trading platform, Beijing Radio and Television Station did not go through open bidding and instead directly procured, via single-source method, 3 million yuan worth of invocation tokens for the Seedance series video generation large model from ByteDance's Volcano Engine, with a contract performance period of 12 months and an agency service fee of 29,450 yuan.

This procurement wave has long since moved beyond Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and media-strong provinces such as Sichuan and Hunan, extending all the way to southwestern border areas like Yunnan. Queuing up to spend millions or even tens of millions of yuan to procure tokens and agent services despite funding shortages shows that traditional television stations are now intensively seeking an AI way out, and the trend has shifted from the "buy hardware and build systems" approach of DeepSeek's early days to "buying invocation volume by the year."

Below, let us look at exactly where television stations are spending their money, and which suppliers are carving off the cake that once belonged to traditional broadcasting system integrators.

3 million yuan to Volcano Engine buys 67-150 hours of 4K video

In the spring of 2024, when Xiaoyu was reviewing the broadcasting AIGC boom at the time, he wrote that television stations across the country were scrambling for "the nation's first," starting with mobilization meetings and the establishment of branded studios. The images produced back then mostly remained at the stage of simple zooming and panning of static images; stamped with an AI-creation watermark and paired with somewhat unnatural digital human anchors, they were already enough to get a television station onto trending topics.

By the second half of 2026, the promotional excitement has faded, replaced by solid industrial applications. Unlike the wave after DeepSeek's release in which various parties bought all-in-one machines, owned their own computing hardware, and deployed systems themselves, buying tokens means AI has changed from a one-off "project" into a monthly-billed "utility expense," becoming a continuous expenditure and meaning that AI investment will become routine.

One-off hardware purchases can deploy text models such as DeepSeek to help write copy and can run simple image-generation models, but they absolutely cannot support industrial-grade video generation tasks. Therefore, broadcasting media AI budgets have had to shift from one-off hardware construction to API subscriptions.

On August 31, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology's "Notice on Launching the Special Action for Cultivating AI Application Service Providers" mentioned "exploring models such as first-purchase-first-use and risk compensation to increase procurement of services such as large models, agents, and Token." The next day, Beijing Radio and Television Station publicized the aforementioned procurement.

The Seedance model family procured this time—its latest version 2.5 was only released on June 23 and only began large-scale external service at the end of July—and only version 2.0 and above support the capabilities mentioned in the announcement, such as multiple reference materials and native 4K. The announcement's "simultaneously accommodate 15 materials as all-around references" corresponds to the 2.0 version model, while Seedance 2.5 was upgraded to 50 reference materials and a maximum of 30 seconds.

From public reports and industry rumors, it can be inferred that Beijing Radio and Television Station intervened in testing at a very early stage of the Seedance model's release. The 4K model of 2.5, as of today—that is, the end of October—has only just opened trials to enterprise users, but it is said that 20 works are already using the model, and the earliest "satellite TV S-level IP work" will air as soon as next month.

According to the current pricing formula of Volcano Ark for the Seedance series, a 5-second 4K clip costs between 27 yuan and 62 yuan (when reference video is included), so 3 million yuan is roughly equivalent to 67-150 hours of 4K material, not counting failed attempts at generation. Entertainment Capital recently conducted a horizontal review of the distribution prices of 720P-resolution Seedance 2.5 video within different AI video canvas workbench products, which can serve as a reference.

The single-source procurement reason stated in the announcement is that "no other similar model has yet been found that can simultaneously meet the above technical capabilities and production adaptation requirements," and Volcano Engine's terms of service do not permit third-party resale, "the only lawful supplier being Volcano Engine."

This contract does not involve equipment procurement or transfer of software copyrights, but rather 12 months of invocation quota and a set of supporting services, including enterprise account activation, concurrency management, interface technical support, usage statistics, commercial licensing, and after-sales support.

Under Volcano Engine's billing rules, the remaining Tokens in a prepaid resource package are automatically forfeited once the package expires, while if the quota is used up within the validity period, billing automatically switches to pay-as-you-go. So it is impossible to expect that this purchase can be "depreciated" and used for five or eight years.

According to a review by industry media, in July, Sichuan Radio and Television's Sichuan Observation reached a strategic cooperation with Volcano Engine, independently built an AIGC production platform, and purchased tens of millions of yuan worth of tokens in one go. Volcano Engine opened to it the Seedance industrial-grade API interface with a concurrency capacity of more than 400 channels, and connected more than 60 mainstream multimodal large models.

In April, Qingdao Radio and Television Station signed with Volcano Engine, and on April 23 released its own one-stop industrialized creation and production platform for AI short dramas and comic dramas, "Qingdrama." By May, the daily Token consumption of the "Qingdrama" platform had exceeded 2.8 billion, with more than 650 enterprises and teams registered to use it.

In June, Hong Kong's Television Broadcasts Limited (TVB) also integrated Seedance 2.0 into its FF studio to carry out AI short drama cooperation, and the short dramas it produces will also be simultaneously listed on Hongguo (see Entertainment Capital's previous report).

In fact, Volcano Engine's largest order was outside television stations. On October 13, ByteDance's joint venture won the bid for Dongyang Data Resources Co., Ltd.'s "Hengdian Film and Television AI Service Platform Construction Project" with 230 million yuan, against a budget of 235 million yuan. Entertainment Capital wrote about this project last week; the tender documents require a pre-training dataset of no fewer than 50 billion tokens.

As for the cooperation framework agreement signed between Guizhou Radio and Television Network Media Group and Volcano Engine on August 27, it is a distribution contract in which Guiguang Group, as a channel distributor, has computing infrastructure called the "Guizhou Large Model Aggregation Comprehensive Service Platform," essentially for ByteDance models to "connect to the province's business."

According to official ByteDance data, driven by Seedance, the combined official API daily average token invocation volume of all ByteDance/Doubao large models reached 120 trillion in March and exceeded 180 trillion in June.

Yunnan TV Station had the densest procurement activity within a week

If the media in Beijing, Sichuan, Qingdao and Hong Kong are spending generously because they are relatively well-off, then this province on the southwestern border will certainly surprise you.

In Entertainment Capital's recent monitoring of bidding lists, the single-province buyer with the densest procurement activity is Yunnan Radio and Television Station.

In just six days, Yunnan TV Station intensively advanced three key projects, including the "Qicaiyun Intelligent Upgrade and Renovation Phase I - Intelligent Capability Integration Project" (winning bid amount 3.16 million yuan), which launched public bidding on September 23 and opened bids on October 15; the "Provincial-Level Converged Media Platform and Qicaiyun Duan Upgrade and Renovation Project Phase I - Operation and Maintenance Security Capability Improvement Project" (winning bid amount 1,695,300 yuan), whose bids were opened the same day; and the "Multimodal Data Processing Computing Power Equipment Procurement Project" with a budget of 550,000 yuan.

Why did Yunnan TV Station intensively spend money on intelligent upgrading of "Qicaiyun" at this point in time? As mentioned above, in the early stage when provincial broadcasters adopted AIGC, many intensively purchased buyout-style facilities and equipment such as DeepSeek all-in-one machines and digital human solutions, and one purchase could be used for a long time. However, local AI hardware deployed in earlier years has gradually reached the point of secondary investment and maintenance such as configuration upgrades.

Looking at the business structure of Yunnan TV Station in recent years, it becomes clear that the expenditure of this procurement is driven simultaneously by grassroots converged media operation tasks and cross-border communication tasks.

According to a 2022 introduction by the All-China Journalists Association, Qicaiyun undertakes construction support for more than 55 county-level converged media centers across Yunnan Province, with 61 county-level converged media centers operating independently on the "Qicaiyun Duan" APP. It also operates the "Lancang-Mekong Audiovisual Matrix," which requires mutual translation and broadcasting in Chinese and five languages: Vietnamese, Lao, Burmese, Khmer and Thai.

To tackle the hard nut of multilingual communication, on August 8, 2024, Yunnan Radio and Television Station joined hands with Tencent Cloud and several other units to establish a new technology experiment center, carrying out research and development around precise recognition of ethnic languages, the virtual digital human "Xiao Caiyun," and intelligent audio and video analysis. By June 2025, Yunnan TV Station released the overall framework of the "Lancang-Mekong Communication Center" for South and Southeast Asia, using the "Qicaiyun" converged media command platform as its technical base.

In February last year, Yunnan TV Station accurately seized the DeepSeek trend. The 3D digital human anchor "Xiao Caiyun" on the "Qicaiyun Duan" client was connected to DeepSeek-V3, and was called "Yunnan's first media application officially connected to DeepSeek." By March, office documents, contract documents and technical materials had been included in the RAG scope based on the V3 model, meaning large models could be used to retrieve these materials and provide question-and-answer services.

As DeepSeek optimized for domestic chips, the self-deployed platform base was further upgraded last October. The "Artificial Intelligence Computing Power Platform Phase I Construction Project" was concluded at 2.18 million yuan, "providing multimodal large model inference services for media business." It delivered two H3C UniServer R5300 G6 servers, the so-called "AI large model inference nodes," at 490,000 yuan each.

But in this wave of intensive procurement by Yunnan TV Station, there was a small episode with a sense of contrast.

The 3.16 million yuan software intelligent integration and the 1,695,300 yuan operation and maintenance security both opened bids smoothly, but the small computing hardware order with a budget of only 550,000 yuan repeatedly failed to attract bidders.

According to the competitive negotiation records, this "Multimodal Data Processing Computing Power Equipment Procurement Project" was to purchase deep learning non-linear editing workstations, AIGC creation and annotation workstations, AIGC display large screens, as well as Wi-Fi 7 routers and Layer 3 managed switches. The first negotiation failed to attract bidders, and in mid-October a second and third negotiation had to be initiated.

Within the same monitoring period, Beijing TV's "Media Asset Core Content Cataloging Service Project" was also declared void, and on the same day only the 980,000 yuan audio cataloging project was retained, won by Beijing Zhongshi Ruide, which had participated in drafting industry standards.

Tens of millions of yuan for tokens and computing power went through with green lights and without a blink; yet for a 550,000 yuan workstation and large screen, even with the "AIGC" label attached, enough bidders could not be found. This reflects the real warmth and chill on the supply side of radio and television AI procurement: budgets for non-standard hardware projects are too small, yet single-source procurement splurges without restraint.

Pulling together a list of these 12 Grade-A key projects from mid-October and the radio and television AI orders from the past six months, Entertainment Capital clearly sees a dramatic reshuffling of the radio and television technology supplier landscape. The radio and television technology market once controlled by Sobey, Dayang, Xinhua Zhiyun and others is evolving into a four-way card game.

The first path is the internet cloud and large-model giants that bypass intermediaries and go directly into the stations. Previously, when internet giants entered television stations, they often had to go through traditional radio and television system integrators for subcontracting. In fact, this may not necessarily be absent now; after all, Sobey's 31.998 million yuan winning bid for Beijing TV's converged media news production system construction included "lightweight production software," referring to 50 sets of Jianying three-year licenses.

Now Beijing TV is spending 3 million yuan to buy Seedance and signing a single-source contract directly with Volcano Engine, with no agent in between earning a price difference. On foundational platforms and major projects, Alibaba Cloud won Beijing TV's 7.728 million yuan "Digital-Intelligent Converged Media News Technology System Phase I (V) Data Middle Platform Basic Support Construction," and also won China Media Group's 56.982 million yuan "CCTV News Client Function Expansion and Iterative Development" mega-order. According to reports, the two iterative budgets for CCTV News and Yangshipin total 125.43 million yuan, focusing on sports vertical AI agents and HarmonyOS NEXT adaptation.

Tencent Cloud is likewise placing pieces frequently. It won Guangdong Radio and Television's "AI Middle Platform of Converged Production Platform" with a budget of 2.97 million yuan for 2.8102 million yuan, and during last year's National Games it built an AI content service platform for Guangdong TV based on the Tencent Cloud Agent Development Platform (ADP), using facial recognition tracking and Hunyuan large-model dynamic understanding to achieve automatic clipping of live-streamed people and highlight reel generation, raising overall production efficiency by 40%.

The second path is the algorithm newcomers that have crossed over from research institutes into provincial-level radio and television. This time, Beijing Zhongke Wenge Technology Co., Ltd., which won Yunnan TV's "Qicai Cloud" intelligent capability integration project for 3.16 million yuan, was incubated in March 2017 by researchers Zeng Dajun, Wang Lei, Luo Yin and others from the Institute of Automation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences who left their posts to start the business. It has raised more than one billion yuan in cumulative financing, and its past investor list already included the CCTV Converged Media Fund.

Previously, Zhongke Wenge had won hundreds of bids in total (Tianyancha data, same below), with its main battlefield concentrated in internet information public opinion, finance and universities. It excels at multilingual semantic understanding and security-compliant value alignment, and its client list includes Xinhua News Agency and CCTV. CEO Luo Yin mentioned in June that the company had self-developed the "Yayi" multilingual multimodal large model with 2.65 trillion tokens of cleaned corpus, the DIOS decision intelligence operating system, and the enterprise-level agent system Claworks compatible with the OpenClaw system.

The third path is the local state-owned digital science platforms and radio and television stations' own technology subsidiaries that are deeply engaged in local government affairs and cultural digitalization services.

On October 19, Guangdong Radio and Television's "Intelligent Draft Writing and Multimodal Knowledge Base Service System Project" with a budget of 950,000 yuan was concluded at 939,000 yuan, requiring the deployment and interconnection of intelligent draft writing, a government document database, intelligent proofreading, a multimodal knowledge base and an AI large model within 20 days after contract signing. The winner, Guangfutong Digital Technology (Guangzhou) Co., Ltd., was established in 2024, is 100% held by Guangzhou State-owned Assets Management Group Co., Ltd., and has successively completed related digital platform upgrades for more than 10 first-tier municipal enterprises in Guangzhou.

The company is the core vehicle under Guangzhou State-owned Assets Management Group carrying the digital implementation of the municipal state-owned enterprise service platform (State-owned Assets and State-owned Enterprises Comprehensive Service Center), and it had long since cooperated with Alibaba Cloud and produced actual implementation plans.

On May 27, Guangfutong and Alibaba Cloud released the "Miman AI Comic Drama Platform," whose underlying layer integrates more than 20 large models including Tongyi Qwen, Wan and Happyhorse, with computing power support provided by the Alibaba Cloud Bailian platform and PAI, while Guangfutong is responsible for private deployment and localized compliance encapsulation for publishing, radio and television, and cultural tourism government and enterprise clients. With the giants' model foundation in its left hand, it steadily catches procurement budgets in its right.

The trend of favoring local state-owned assets and station-affiliated enterprises can be seen everywhere. On September 30, Guangdong TV Station Director Li Yihang led a team to visit another municipal state-owned enterprise, Guangzhou Digital Technology Group, to discuss domestic computing power supply and AIGC content security cooperation. Meanwhile, Chudian Media, controlled by Guangdong TV, won its own "County-Level Converged Media Center Provincial Technical Platform Construction and Operation Project" for as much as 10.794 million yuan.

Yunnan TV's 1,695,300 yuan operation and maintenance security order was given to Yunnan Yunshangyun Informationization Co., Ltd. under the Yunnan provincial state-owned enterprise Yuntou Group. Shanxi TV's 2.6 million yuan "New Generation Converged Media Service" project fell into the hands of Shanxi Mobile.

The fourth route is traditional broadcast integration vendors striving to hold on to the production and broadcasting market. The veteran technology leaders still hold the ballast of tens-of-millions-yuan production and broadcasting upgrades. Chengdu Sobey has won over 4,000 bids cumulatively, and in early October it won three major orders in a row: 23.25 million yuan from Tibet TV, 21.3 million yuan from Guizhou TV, and the aforementioned 31.9983 million yuan from Beijing TV. Among them, Tibet TV's new headquarters news production and broadcasting system will transform this station—the last in the country to complete its high-definition upgrade—beyond recognition; this tender went out three times starting in late July before a result was reached.

Meanwhile, Beijing North ACE, a subsidiary of Hong Kong's ACE, won Beijing TV's 2.865 million yuan converged media studio upgrade; CBIC, directly under the National Radio and Television Administration, won Henan TV's 1.6736 million yuan intelligent media asset offline storage project; and Xinhua Zhiyun, established in 2017 as a 1 billion yuan joint venture between Xinhua News Agency and Alibaba, has also won over 500 bids cumulatively. Traditional vendors such as Beijing Zhongke Dayang are also pushing "cloud + edge" lightweight production and broadcasting; for example, they helped Hunan TV's "Xiangchao" league adopt a model in which only camera operators are sent to the venue while production is done in the cloud, cutting the per-match production cost from 50,000-100,000 yuan to 10,000-20,000 yuan.

Video tokens and image-text tokens are two different things

Back to the core question of this article: at a time when local broadcasters generally face operating pressure, why do TV stations still grit their teeth and spend millions of yuan to buy tokens and build agent platforms?

On August 31, "Post-Journey to the West," the first domestic AIGC long-form drama, produced by Mango TV, based on its self-developed "Mango Lingchuang" platform, and generated by calling Seedance 2.0 and 2.5, landed in Hunan Satellite TV's prime time slot. It not only took first place in ratings among provincial satellite TVs in the same time slot, but also drove Mango Super Media's market value up by about 11.65 billion yuan within two trading days of its premiere.

According to China Entrepreneur's interview with Li Dongshen, chief director of "Post-Journey to the West," and Mango TV's creative team, this 30-episode, 40-minutes-per-episode long drama costs about 900,000 yuan per episode, only 20,000-30,000 yuan per minute; a 3-minute fight scene would actually require 4-5 million yuan in traditional live-action shooting. The drama's promotion and scheduling can be called S+ level, so the cost dropped to 1/8 to 1/10, and compared with traditional 3D animation, the production cycle was compressed by 70%.

To support the continuity of a long drama, Mango Lingchuang accumulates and reuses character and scene assets, and after the release of the "21 Measures for Broadcasting," it tried for the first time a "produce, review, and broadcast simultaneously" model. In the five episodes of the second chapter, "War in Heaven," three and a half episodes were even scrapped and redone within 20 days based on audience and danmaku feedback.

As traditional big-budget variety shows and TV dramas shrink, provincial satellite TVs are aggressively using AI dramas to fill prime-time schedules. Examples include Zhejiang TV's "Chinese Legends: White Snake," Dragon TV's "Treasures of Shanghai Museum: A Hundred Objects View China," Anhui TV's "Record of Peach Blossom Pool," and Guangdong TV's "Under the Dark Current 2." Purchasing video-generation computing power has indeed helped TV stations raise output and lower costs.

For needs that are not Seedance and not video production, results that could already be delivered back in the era of DeepSeek local all-in-one machines are what TV stations prefer to deploy locally. From the DS craze then to the lobster craze earlier this year, there is no exception.

Second, some broadcasting institutions still have relatively surplus computing power, and they are beginning to try repackaging the computing power and agents they bought into industrial services to earn money outside their stations. Part of the computing power monitored this time was used for resale to "expand reproduction."

Entertainment Capital's monitoring found that Shenzhen Media Group is procuring "2026 Shenzhen Culture and Tourism Agent Platform Cloud Services" with a control price of 298,000 yuan. This is a follow-up maintenance action for the "Wanyouji" project launched in May last year by Shenzhen Media Group and Shenzhen Investment Holdings together with the Shenzhen Municipal Culture, Radio, Television, Tourism and Sports Bureau. Since this "ticket stub service platform" began trial operation at the end of last year and officially launched in April this year, as of September it has served more than 130,000 registered users, connected 36 venues, 260 cinemas, more than 500 event products, and 209 merchant partners, served more than 12 municipal-level sports and performance ticket-stub consumption-promotion activities, with a maximum verification rate of over 90% and a consumption leverage ratio of about 3.5 times.

Similarly, the aforementioned Qingdao Broadcasting's "Qingdrama" platform, after purchasing Volcano Engine's Seedance 2.0, repackages it through an intermediary and hands it over to small teams in its joint venture incubator (i.e., "one-person companies/OPCs") for use. The 33 OPCs settled in the Qingdao AIGC·OPC Industrial Base can also enjoy copyright confirmation and distribution channel rights such as Hongguo short dramas. Qingdao Broadcasting even won the Shandong Dezhou Lingcheng District AIGC·OPC Industrial Base project in May, replicating its park operation model externally.

Against the backdrop of broadcasting channels and frequencies at all levels being successively shut down, merged, or converted, and some satellite TVs contracting their out-of-province coverage, the tolls of old channels are receding, but AIGC's new "computing power utility bills" have become a new hot spot for investment by broadcasting institutions.