Movie time for Jack Ma's Alibaba

Alibaba Pictures plans to invest in another five of Chow's films in the next seven years. If they all turn out to be as profitable, Alibaba Pictures will at least look like a Chinese Warner Bros in the making.

Stephen Chow is just one of the celebrities in the film industry that the old ChinaVision Media had good partnerships with. With these powerful resources, Jack Ma's motion picture business will develop smoothly.

But sitting back to enjoy the results is not Ma's style. He once said his film company planned to introduce the way how U.S. TV dramas are made to produce its own TV series, where the audience has a say in the plot, and grass-roots elite screenwriters take part in the script writing process, a revolutionary method of TV production that will increase audience loyalty.

How this will influence or improve China's film industry is still too early to determine. But it is likely to bring an end to the era when content dominated everything. Looking at the larger picture, Jack Ma plans to have his film company be part of his well-connected chain of industries.

Jack Ma does not have a video portal at the moment, such as iQIYI, a branch of Baidu, and Tencent Video, but he is taking on the challenge using another approach, by controlling content before deciding how it will spread via different outlets.

Similarly, Alibaba lags behind Xiaomi and LeTV in hardware, but Ma has shown a clear intention to take a greater market share in television.

Based on Taobao, which is like a cash machine, Jack Ma plans to center all his businesses on users' consumption behaviors. Though he said "no gaming for now, only video content," he may well change his words before long. As a businessman always chases his interests, Jack Ma is bound to set foot in future OTT services, the gaming industry, sports, and even charities, because they all will bring him profit in one way or another.