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The use of AI for video generation is a hot area of GenAI fuelled innovation at present. If you have not seen or tried out some of the latest tools like Google’s Veo 3, Runway or OpenAI’s Sora then definitely take a look. Whilst some of the biggest use cases are going to be for marketing, advertising and just general content creation, another big potential market that will be disrupted is the film and TV industry. If you live anywhere near Reading or happen to drive along the M4, you will have seen the huge Shinfield studios that were built several years ago, and which have already been used to film series such as Star Wars series ‘The Acolyte’ and Netflix series ‘Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story’.
The film industry is a significant area of growth for the UK economy. Official figures from the BFI’s show that film and high-end TV production spend in the UK was £5.6bn in 2024, a 31% increase on 2023. Yet this is an industry that over the next decade faces huge potential disruption from AI. The creative capabilities of GenAI models have I think already surpassed what in the early day of GenAI development many expected. In fact, if you cast your minds back, the ‘creativity’ of AI was often touted as its main weakness and where humans would add the most value, yet creativity has turned out be a core strength of GenAI models.
So why the focus on video generation you might be wondering. Well US HQ’ed GenAI startup Moonvalley, announced it has raised $84m in additional funding for its AI solutions targeted at professional filmmakers and brand designers, bringing its total funding to $154m. Investors include General Catalyst, CoreWeave, Comcast Ventures, and YCombinator.
The AI startup recently released its flagship model to the public, dubbed Marey, which is designed to be a production-grade AI videography platform built on purely licensed content, making it an “ethical” model, for professional filmmakers and brand designers. The platform can generate videos from not only text prompts but also from sketches, photos, and other video clips, it also enables users to control camera angles, motion transfer and trajectory, just like traditional filming, but all on AI generated content. The real differentiator is the ‘ethical’ component though. Marey is trained only on licensed, high-resolution footage, no scraped content or user submissions, meaning there should be no legal challenges on its commercial use.
Generative AI’s entry into film and media has the potential to be transformative, bringing down the cost of film production and speeding up content creation through use of automation and GenAI. Thorny questions about copyright, creative credits, and jobs remain, and those in the industry have a right to be concerned for their futures and retaining control of intellectual property. Whilst right now most AI tools can only generate short video clips, the potential for creating longer movies and shows is clearly there, what this means for the long-term future of film and TV studios remains to be seen, but it is an area to watch closely.
Posted by: Simon Baxter at 10:01