PARQOR is the handbook every media and technology executive needs to navigate the seismic shifts underway in the media business. Through in-depth analysis from a network of senior media and tech leaders, Andrew Rosen cuts through what's happening, highlights what it means and suggests where you should go next.
In Q4 2022, PARQOR will be focusing on four trends: this essay is on the theme, "Hollywood’s future lies in the creator economy, what happens next?”
Two weeks ago I attended the first-ever PromptTopia. It was hosted at the offices of Union Square Ventures, and it offered “a day of presentations and conversation exploring what’s happening when you have an interface shift into the creative possibilities of audio, speech, art and video in the AI space.”
The focus of that day was the user experience of the “prompt” - entering text into an Artificial Intelligence (AI) engine text box which looks like any search box on any website, and the AI system generates audio, speech, art or video based on that text. It was all built on stable diffusion or DALL-E, which are AI engines primarily used to generate detailed images conditioned on text descriptions.
We saw demos for nine different engines and use cases. We ended with Holosheet, where “you input a prompt and the AIs generate story, visuals and a title”. In other words, write a story idea like “The wizard approached the abyss" and the AI generates a storyboard that looks like the one below.
In this moment, Holosheet looks like an AI companion to screenwriting, basically an AI tool like Grammarly but for a niche group of writers.
The technology is rapidly evolving, and the use cases are rapidly expanding. There are plenty of essays being written and to be written on the topic.
The challenge is where to begin from PARQOR’s perspective. I think the best starting point is the text prompt itself. Because it hits on “The Netflix Paradox”, “'The Office' Paradox” or “The YouTube Paradox” that I wrote about in August, and which I wrote about again last week: the “walled garden” model is unusually vulnerable to the power of third-party platforms like YouTube to find more audiences with the same content.
So what will happen when third-party platforms powered by AI can deliver video and photo interpretations of owned and original content?
However AI, stable diffusion and DALL-E end up transforming video, the best business models for AI-generated video content may still end up being creator economy business models.
Total words: 1,000
Total time reading: 4 minutes
I think the most helpful example is the one that “The Office” writer and actor B.J. Novak delivered on the Recode Media podcast, after host Peter Kafka asked him whether the show felt “less popular” since it left Netflix. Novak answered: “I thought it would feel less popular, but the weird ...