Hunan Radio and Television

Hunan Radio and Television, the state-owned provincial broadcaster headquartered in Changsha and operationally based in the Malanshan Video and Cultural Industry Park (马栏山视频文创产业园), has built what is widely regarded as the most extensive digital human and AIGC avatar program among Chinese provincial broadcasters. Working through its listed media arm Mango Excellent Media (芒果超媒) and a constellation of in-house technology subsidiaries, the group has steadily moved digital virtual humans from novelty stage features into a structural part of its production pipeline. The arc runs from a single experimental virtual host in 2021 to an integrated platform of performer-style avatars, AI variety directors, embodied robots, county-level news anchor products, and cultural-relics interpretation digital humans, all running on a self-developed multimodal large model.

The flagship of this program is Xiao Yang (小漾), the digital host announced on 2 October 2021 as part of Hunan Satellite TV's "Youth China" (青春中国) brand refresh. Her name derives from the English word "young", and she was constructed jointly by the State Administration of Radio and Television's 5G High-Tech Video Multi-Scene Application Key Laboratory and the in-group studio Mango Hallucinatory Vision Technology (湖南芒果幻视科技) over more than three months, with input from more than thirty digital artists and engineers and reference image data drawn from hundreds of women. Xiao Yang exists in two costume sets, a contemporary look and a guofeng (国风) Han Chinese costume, and is text-driven with motion-capture support. From January 2022 onwards she became a permanent digital co-host on Hello Saturday (《你好，星期六》), Hunan Satellite TV's flagship Saturday variety programme, appearing regularly alongside He Jiong (何炅), Yang Yuying (杨钰莹) and Wang Hedi (王鹤棣). She has also fronted successive cross-year galas, the China International Copyright Expo, and the Golden Rooster Award Project Forum, and group leadership has consistently positioned her as a performer-style virtual idol distinct from the productivity tools introduced later.

The 31 December 2022 Hunan Satellite TV / Mango TV cross-year concert marked a substantial expansion of this performer-side ambition. The gala featured what was described as China's first all-digital-human band, performing the song ART together with a digital twin of singer Yao Anna (姚安娜). The four digital musicians and Yao Anna's twin were produced by external partner Zaomeng Xinghe (造梦星河) over half a year of preparation, using AIGC motion drive, AI facial sync, AI real-time rendering and AI composition on a virtual production stage, with each band member designed to debut as a separate virtual idol and to play characters in Yao Anna's animation IP The White Planet (《白色星球》). The same gala carried the Make Romance (《制造浪漫》) segment, in which two avatars named Kang Kang (康康) and Guo Guo (果果), modelled on actors Shen Mengchen (沈梦辰) and Fan Shiqi (范世琦), interacted in the same shot via full-pipeline real-time motion and facial capture with AR rendering. Earlier the same year, the Mango TV Innovation Research Institute had also debuted the virtual host YAOYAO at its algorithm contest awards ceremony, framed less as an idol and more as a productivity demonstration for the platform's virtual scene asset programme.

The next major step shifted the centre of gravity from the stage to the production room. On 15 March 2024 Hunan Radio and Television unveiled Aimang (爱芒, English name AIM), described as China's first AI variety director formally on staff at a broadcaster. Aimang is a composite character: her face is composited from images of dozens of senior Hunan Satellite TV and Mango TV producers, and her voice is synthesised from young directors born in the 1990s and 2000s, deliberately producing an androgynous register. Built on the in-house Mango Vertical Large Model (芒果垂类大模型), she is described by group technologists as a cross-model integrated system combining virtual human technology, a large language model and video generation modules. She debuted as assistant director on the travel variety programme We Three (《我们仨》), hosted by the Wang Tian Studio with Guo Qilin (郭麒麟), Mao Buyi (毛不易) and Wei Daxun (魏大勋), and within months extended to Singer 2024 (《歌手2024》), Love Study Tour (《爱的修学旅行》) and Hunan Travel Notes (《湘行漫记》), where she contributed structured script deconstruction, casting recommendations, costume preview and promotional poster generation. Mango TV CTO Lu Haibo (卢海波) has explicitly contrasted Aimang's "back-office worker" role with Xiao Yang's "performer" role, framing the two as deliberate complements rather than substitutes.

Underneath these visible characters sits the Mango Large Model (芒果大模型), which obtained Cyberspace Administration of China generative AI registration on 23 July 2024 as the third batch and fourth model registered in Hunan Province. The model is trained on a multimodal data corpus accumulated through a long-running "new media asset library" (新型媒资库) project that re-defined the group's content storage formats four to five years before the model's launch. It also draws on external components including Tsinghua-affiliated Zhipu AI's ChatGLM and inference acceleration work with Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and forms the engine on which the group's AIGC short-form pipeline, the Aimang director and the cultural-relics digital humans all run.

Cultural relics have become the second principal arena for HBS digital humans. On 19 August 2024 the wholly owned second-tier subsidiary Mango Digital Intelligence (芒果数智) launched the Shanhai (山海) digital cultural relics platform, with more than ten thousand digital artefacts initially live and a six-language international version covering Chinese, English, French, Spanish, Japanese and Korean. Self-developed neural surface reconstruction algorithms cut artefact capture time by ninety per cent, and a real-time digital capture of the Dragon Head (龙首) artefact was broadcast from Shanghai to Changsha in thirteen minutes and fourteen seconds. At year-end 2025 Mango Digital Intelligence and the Peking University history department jointly released Shanhai Xuanji (山海璇玑), described as China's first historical cultural relics vertical large model, trained on 270 million words of Qin–Han knowledge corpora and 1.08 million expert question-and-answer pairs, with a five-agent matrix covering cultural Q&A, history fact-checking, exhibit narration, artefact 3D modelling and a creative workshop. Built on top of this model, the Shanhai Lingtong (山海灵通) AI relic-explanation digital human terminal, showcased at the November 2025 China New Media Technology Exhibition in Changsha, combines speech recognition, a virtual digital human and bare-eye 3D display to act as an expert-level digital tour guide.

The boundary between digital humans and embodied robots was crossed in 2025 with the appearance of Xiao Jiu (小玖) on the long-running variety travel programme The Chinese Restaurant Africa Entrepreneurship Season (《中餐厅·非洲创业季》), which aired between June and September. Developed jointly with embodied AI partner Zhiyuan Robotics (智元) and powered by the Mango Large Model, Xiao Jiu performed welcoming, food serving, simultaneous interpretation, witty commentary, music composition and poster design at the Moroccan restaurant location, with a celebrity-cloned voice based on cast members. Mango Excellent Media confirmed in an investor relations response on 19 August 2025 that the project sat on a joint research basis with the Mango Large Model and was being positioned for further expansion into venue guidance and cultural-tourism narration.

The most consequential 2026 development is the move into news. From 1 May 2026, Hunan Economic TV (湖南经视) deployed two new AI news anchors named Shenger and Shuangshuang (生生 / 双双) on the channel's Economic TV News (《经视新闻》), paired with an AI director (AI导播) handling automatic camera switching for fully automated bulletin coverage during the May Day holiday window. Each broadcast carries a continuous "AI generated" label in the upper-right corner, in line with the four-department Measures for Identification of AI Generated Content effective from September 2025. The anchors are positioned within a human-machine collaboration model, in which AI handles routine bulletins and weather while human staff retain deep reporting and live spot coverage. The launch followed Hunan Satellite TV's earlier deployment of an AI unmanned broadcasting system for a basketball match in April 2026.

A parallel track has productised the same technology for the broader Chinese broadcasting market. The Mango Smart Media (湖南芒果智媒) AI digital-human anchor product, together with the affiliated Tiangong Yunji (天工云矶) platform, has been deployed at county-level converged media centres including Aronqi Banner (阿荣旗融媒体中心), Wencheng County (文成县融媒体中心) and Foping County (佛坪融媒体中心). On 10–11 April 2025 a depth integration memorandum of understanding was signed in Shenyang between the radio and television bureaus of Liaoning, Jilin, Heilongjiang, Inner Mongolia and Hunan, alongside a Malanshan Smart Media Creators Camp special focused on the Northeast region.

International audiences are reached through the Mango TV International APP, originally launched on 19 March 2018 and substantially upgraded with cross-modal translation and lip-sync digital human capabilities running on the Mango Large Model intelligent base. As of the first half of 2025 the application supported nine interface languages, with Arabic added for the Middle East, and seventeen subtitle languages. The 11 September 2025 partnership with Beijing International Studies University to establish the Smart Film and Television Translation Joint Laboratory (智能影视翻译联合实验室), focused on multilingual translation, lip-sync localisation and the "Qingmang" (青芒) talent programme, has become the academic backbone for these multilingual virtual presenters, while an April 2026 strategic agreement with Aishi Technology (爱诗科技) integrated an external video large model into the in-house Mango Quanjing Workshop (芒果全景工作站).

The whole apparatus is being aligned, sometimes in real time, with a tightening regulatory framework. Hunan Mango Wuji Technology (湖南芒果无际科技) was a named drafting unit for the State Administration of Radio and Television's recommended national industry standard GY/T 411-2024 Technical Requirements for Digital Virtual Humans, issued on 28 November 2024 with immediate effect, which sets technical requirements across digital human classification, application scenarios, image, drive technology, platform capability and security, including individual-consent requirements for using natural persons' face and voice biometrics. The Cyberspace Administration of China's draft Administrative Measures for Digital Virtual Human Information Services, released for public comment on 3 April 2026, requires display of a continuous "Digital Human" (数字人) label, single-item consent for sensitive personal information, prohibitions on imitating identifiable natural persons without consent, special protection for actors driving real-person digital humans, and platform audit obligations. The Interim Measures for AI Anthropomorphic Interactive Services, jointly issued by the Cyberspace Administration of China, the National Development and Reform Commission, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the Ministry of Public Security and the State Administration for Market Regulation, take effect on 15 July 2026 and apply directly to the user-facing AI character chat functionality on the Mango TV International APP. Aimang, Xiao Yang, Shenger, Shuangshuang and Shanhai Lingtong all sit within scope of these instruments, and the central technical question for the next eighteen months is whether HBS's vertically integrated, in-house-first model can absorb compliance overhead more smoothly than peers built around third-party suppliers.

• https://www.hunantv.com — Official site of Hunan Satellite TV (湖南卫视), the group's flagship broadcast channel and the primary platform for Xiao Yang and Aimang.

• https://www.mgtv.com — Mango TV (芒果TV) streaming platform operated by Happy Sunshine, the main on-demand outlet for AIGC content and digital host appearances.

• https://www.mgtv.cn — Corporate-facing domain associated with Mango Excellent Media (芒果超媒), the Shenzhen-listed media arm of the group.

• https://www.imgo.tv — Integrated Hunan Radio and Television / Mango portal aggregating channels, programmes and group communications.

• https://www.hbs.cn — Hunan Broadcasting System (湖南广播电视台) parent broadcaster website covering group-level corporate information.

• https://www.xiaomang.com — Xiaomang (小芒) e-commerce platform integrating AIGC virtual try-on and co-creation studio features.

• https://www.fengmang.com — Fengmang (风芒) short-form video and micro-drama platform hosting AIGC paid micro-drama productions such as Coordinates (《坐标》).

• https://www.shanhaiapp.com — Shanhai (山海) digital cultural relics platform run by Mango Digital Intelligence and underpinning the Shanhai Lingtong digital tour-guide terminal.