China’s most-watched television event has become an unlikely proving ground for consumer AI. During this year’s Spring Festival Gala, ByteDance embedded its chatbot Doubao (豆包) directly into the broadcast. The scale of the engagement is pretty hard to ignore.
Doubao recorded 1.9 billion interactions over the course of the show. That figure spans everything from viewers tapping prompts to generating responses in real time, effectively turning a passive viewing experience into something closer to a second-screen activation.
So how did they pull this off? The integration went beyond simple product placement. Doubao appeared through on-screen cues, interactive features, and AI-assisted explanations tied to performances. Viewers were prompted to ask questions, explore lyrics, and engage with content as it unfolded. The result was less an advert, more an infrastructure layer sitting quietly beneath the entertainment.
Behind the scenes, ByteDance’s Volcano Engine provided the computing backbone as the gala’s official cloud partner. But it was Doubao – the consumer-facing app – that captured attention. At its peak, the system reportedly handled tens of billions of tokens per minute, underscoring both the scale of demand and the technical maturity required to sustain it.
ByteDance and the Spring Festival Gala: The wider picture
This isn’t the only big AI play tied to the Spring Festival. Tencent and Alibaba were at it too, pushing their own versions of AI through red-packet giveaways with numbers in the billions of RMB. What ByteDance has demonstrated here is a different playbook. Rather than positioning AI as a standalone tool, Doubao was embedded into a cultural ritual with built-in reach. The gala’s audience did the rest.
This is important. What Tencent and Alibaba were seeking to do with their red packet giveaways was secure traffic, because in China’s AI race distribution matters most – sometimes even more than model performance. As with the red-packet push, what remains is the question of whether Doubao will be able to hold onto the users its gala gambit attracted.
