Tencent Launches 'Green Bubble' Short Dramas Inside WeChat to Crack ByteDance's Hongguo
Tencent has quietly launched Green Bubble, a free short-drama service built into WeChat rather than shipped as an app — its fourth attempt at the genre since 2021, and its most direct challenge yet to ByteDance's Hongguo and the 168 million people who open it every day.
Tencent has quietly switched on its most serious challenge yet to ByteDance's short-drama empire: Green Bubble, a free short-drama service that lives not as an app but as a mini-program inside WeChat, China's dominant messaging platform. Its interface, as Jiemian News and Beijing Daily walked through it, has three parts: a free theatre, an immersive swipe feed — and a "friends are watching" row that recommends dramas on the basis of what your WeChat contacts have been viewing, alongside regional charts of the "what Beijing is watching" variety.
The target is Hongguo, ByteDance's free short-drama app, which Beijing Daily put at 168 million daily active users — the "nearly 200 million" of the trending hashtag. Hongguo was our story yesterday: the app so absorbing that the week's most-liked warning on Weibo was simply not to download it. Tencent knows the pull of the format; this is its fourth attempt since 2021, after a "Ten-Minute Theatre" brand on Tencent Video, a "Mars Short Drama Club," and an official WeChat short-drama mini-program launched in June 2025 — a slot that has now, without announcement, been handed to Green Bubble.
The launch was greeted with a joke that doubled as a history lesson. Hongguo and Green Bubble are the names of two puppet characters from the same long-running CCTV children's programme, and Weibo users were quick to note that "as kids we watched Hongguoguo and Green Bubble; grown up, we're still watching Hongguoguo and Green Bubble" (小时候看红果果绿泡泡，长大了还是红果果绿泡泡). China's two biggest internet companies are now fighting a viewing-time war under the names of a kindergarten double act.
The strategy, as Tencent frames it, is social: rather than out-algorithm Hongguo, lean on the one asset WeChat has and Hongguo lacks — your actual friends. Its privacy notice says the mini-program collects your browsing, watching, sharing, likes, comments and saves, plus the dramas your friends have watched, to personalize recommendations. Among the most-liked responses to the launch laid out the logic and its limit in one breath (translated): "Hongguo's advantage is that the free-short-drama habit already exists — people open it to find and follow shows. Tencent's advantage is the social graph, which can lower the cost of discovery. The real opportunity is not to rebuild Hongguo but to turn WeChat into the social entrance for drama — from 'I go find dramas myself' to 'my friends recommended it, we talk about it together.' But having traffic is not the same as having drama viewers; someone forwarding is not someone watching to the end."
A skeptic cut closer to the feature's premise: the people most likely to binge the AI-generated dramas that fill Green Bubble's own first menu tab, he argued, "probably don't want anyone to know what they're watching." And Tencent has form for retreat — within the past fortnight it announced the wind-down of two of its own AI products, part of what 36Kr chronicles as the industry's ever-more-crowded AI graveyard.
The question Green Bubble will answer within the year is one neither company has written onto a feature list: whether a drama you binge past midnight is something you want your friends to see you watching.