Thanks for sharing your thoughts, you’ve made some very relevant and reasonable points. I really appreciate it when people make differing arguments, because it generates a good discussion for everyone to understand a topic.
I think in such a B2B play, a tool that still requires some human input and oversight enables the service provider first. For example – if you take the recruitment space, an AI tool that says, screens CVs better than others is more likely to be adopted by the recruiter before the client. Simply because the client doesn’t have enough utilisation for the amount of money it would take to buy an account, while the recruiter will have enough work from multiple accounts to have a far higher utilisation of the tool.
This is a good example here. I have a slightly differing viewpoint. SORA and PIKA are not purely-B2B plays, rather they’re B2C as well. In the example you’ve provided above, you’re assuming that the cost of availing text-to-video services is going to be significant. We don’t know much about SORA pricing, but looking at the pricing provided by PIKA, even the most expensive of their tiers is only at 700$ for a yearly subscription. Even for individual creators, this isn’t a large amount, let alone for a movie studio.
Another thing to understand here is that a movie, after being shot on set, spends about 6-8 months minimum in post-production these days. This is due to multiple individual factors, though one of the most significant factors is video-editing. Even if you assume that the monetary savings of AI offerings are not going to be worth it as is, do you think a production studio would rather spend weeks engaging in a back-and-forth with a third party VFX studio instead of doing minor touchups on their raw footage by themselves, and leaving the major changes for the specialised VFX studios? I’m betting that it would turn out faster for them to simply use one of these tools and leave out all the situations where these Video generation models are suffering to be handled by the human specialists.
Eventually ofc product SaaS solutions do disrupt service cos but usually dont kill the latter.
Of course, none of these offerings are going to kill companies like Phantom or Basilic, it would be unwise to even assume so. However, considering that Phantom prides itself for providing about 3000 shorts to date and that 10-20% of their revenue is from commercials (quoting the previous quarter concall), I’m very concerned about the potential erosion of this revenue stream. As I said earlier, the movie business for now seems to be safe and sound, but might not be in the future (for minor touch-up related revenues that is).
Lemme know if what I’m saying makes sense. You should definitely invest if you’re conviction is strong. Sorry for the delayed response, PhD life is too busy haha!