Chosen, an online feature film released through iQiyi, was also sold to Netflix earlier this year.[Photo provided to China Daily]

According to Zhang Hong, deputy head of the China Film Association, the total domestic revenue from online films was only 100 million yuan in 2014, which rocketed to 2 billion yuan in 2017. He predicts that the figure will continue its upward curve to reach 3 billion yuan this year.

In comparison, last year's total box-office revenue for domestic films in Chinese cinemas was 30 billion yuan, so Zhang believes that there is still a huge potential in the market for online movies. He estimates that internet features attracted 800 million Chinese viewers in 2017, around half the number of those who visited cinemas.

As China's paid-for video-on-demand market has taken off, Zhang sees the bigger picture and recognizes the potential for huge growth in the near future.

The biggest problem facing the burgeoning market, however, is that it is choked by a bottleneck of quality.

Up until now, Chinese online drama series like Day and Night and Burning Ice have proved incredibly popular and garnered widespread acclaim, with each scoring more than 8.5 points out of 10 on the popular TV-and-film-rating-platform, Douban.com. Comparably, online films have struggled to capture the public's imagination to the same degree. Some put this down to a lack of star power and, perhaps more importantly, quality in both content and production value.

For example, fantasy-romance The Ferry Man: Manjusaka garnered 40 million yuan in revenue from iQiyi's users, who were charged to watch it, making it the highest-grossing online film so far this year. Its 7.2-point rating on Douban.com is an improvement over the rating of its counter-parts from 2016 and 2017, which attracted no more than a 4-point rating.

Consequently, the industry is appealing for an improvement of quality, and iQiyi, with these new measures in place, is going to be a tougher sell than ever.