河马剧场

Our take — 河马剧场 for short drama

河马剧场 (Hema Theater) is Dianzhong's free, ad-funded short drama app and one of the flagship products of China's domestic free-with-ads wave. Our read is that its real moat is the parent company: Dianzhong grew out of web fiction, owns an IP-to-production-to-distribution chain, and runs DramaBox overseas — so the free app functions as a traffic engine for a much larger content machine.

Domestically it chases 红果, ByteDance's free incumbent, running the same model without a Douyin-scale traffic faucet — Dianzhong leans on paid acquisition and its own content pool instead. Globally it pairs with sibling DramaBox: free at home, coin-paid abroad. For studios, one Dianzhong deal can plausibly route a short drama into both the domestic-free and overseas-paid channels at once.

• Dianzhong's micro-drama product line
• Same parent as DramaBox and Webfic
• Free-with-ads domestic model
• Parent runs web fiction and short drama together

Written by the DramaSo Tools editorial team, 2026-07 — an editorial read of the official site, not a hands-on score.