Source: AI投什么
Image Source: Generated by Wujie AI
Recent hot topics in AI videos, HeyGen, which made money earlier, is seeking breakthroughs in survival, while Pika, which has become a darling of capital, seems to have no need to worry about short-term commercialization. Unlike the former, the video generation company represented by Pika is not simply a tool. Behind the positioning of "collaborative creation," it is full of potential to subvert the old ecosystem.
01 Talking about the digital person of income
At one time, early digital human companies did not need to boast about their income. IP, digital twins, and virtual avatars were the key elements worth putting in the headlines. The dream of the metaverse comes and goes in a hurry, happy but short-lived.
Today, after HeyGen's video of Taylor Swift speaking Chinese went viral, the subsequent media focused on breaking through the annual recurring revenue (ARR) of 18 million US dollars to prove the commercial feasibility of its products and the excellent operational conversion rate. Companies in the development stage do not always disclose their income to the outside world unless it is important to certain specific stakeholders.
The significant tool attributes and amazing product effects of HeyGen may make people feel that it is not difficult for it to make money. However, in reality, digital humans are not a technology with a particularly broad commercialization scenario. Selecting users with sustainable payment capabilities in limited commercial landing opportunities such as short videos, teaching, and marketing, and defeating competitors is a comprehensive test of technology, product, and operational capabilities.
Among the expected customers, some have great demand but weak payment capabilities, such as live streaming and short videos, where the majority of anchors and creators find it difficult to monetize themselves. On the other hand, some have strong payment capabilities but face too many substitute products, such as marketing videos, where high-quality first parties are often surrounded by a large number of competitors in different fields waiting to share the budget.
In such an environment, financial data is the only convincing standard. It can be said that whether HeyGen's revenue growth can keep up with its valuation and traffic is the core factor determining its future capital operation in the next two to three years.
Even in scenarios where deep cultivation is necessary to achieve results, it is necessary to guard against peers internally and against large factories externally. Alibaba's Animate Anyone and ByteDance's MagicAnimate have been recently released, and it is obvious how these two products are meaningful for live streaming and short videos. As large factories can quickly internalize the directions they can cover without considering short-term gains, they will rapidly encroach on those areas.
02 Aiming at the film and television industry, Pika
Video generation companies represented by Pika, Runway, and Neverends, although inevitably sparking discussions about "when they can land," have a different path from HeyGen.
As a tool, digital humans need to reflect the user's intentions as accurately as possible. For example, HeyGen will match the user's script with mouth movements, and MagicAnimate will generate actions based on the selected skeleton. Similar to image generation, video generation companies are actually more suitable to be called collaborative creators. Whether it is text-generated video or image-generated video, AI will provide some creativity on its own, such as the direction of movements, changes in lighting, and background motion. Because videos carry a much higher amount of information and creative elements than images, this positioning as "collaborative creators" will be more obvious.
Although future models may possess both capabilities, satisfying the deterministic needs of professionals who can describe details and providing a large amount of assistance and supplementation for more non-professional creators, it is clear that the latter brings more longing and imagination than the former.
From the recent interviews with the founders of Pika, their inclination can be seen: "Many artists are worried that AI video tools will replace them, but my personal experience is that AI cannot replace them. It can help artists to more effectively realize creative ideas and make it easier for a wider range of non-professionals to use creative tools."
AI does not replace artists; it only gives more people the opportunity to become artists. The sword of video generation companies is aimed at the commercial top stream in the content industry: movies and TV series.
As a behemoth that has continued from the industrial age to the present, despite its rampant problems, conservatism, and decline, the richness of various industries, the intense public attention, and the wide audience around movies and TV series still make it the leader in entertainment content. The problem of the film and television industry has never been the problem of the entertainment form itself, but the problem of the core practitioners who control the industry.
The Internet has never truly changed the film and television industry; it has only inserted new channels and capital forces into the old model. Content production and organizational structure are still controlled by "insiders," and they quickly become one with the new forces of the Internet. AI videos finally show us the possibility of breaking the monopoly of the film and television industry circles.
In the future, any individual with creativity (or a small team) and GPT, Midjourney, Pika, and Agents with various film knowledge will form a crew, turning wonderful stories in their minds into movies in front of a computer—perhaps initially rough, but there are no hidden rules of the physical world here, no need to socialize with the big shots, no need to flatter the stars, you can focus on improving the quality of the content—as long as there are enough creators and the technology is powerful enough, many people will eventually stand out, and high-quality film and television creation will eventually flourish.
Even if it is not Pika, it will be other video generation companies. Any investor who has a bit of imagination about overthrowing the hegemony of Hollywood in their lifetime will understand what kind of dream this technology represents. In this process, whether it lands or not is not so conspicuous, because the huge money at the end is expected to be visible.
03 The ecology never goes out of style
Just as image generation websites often come with a community for publishing images, in the future, movies, TV series, or animations made on Pika can be directly released on Pika. This may be the first time that the production, distribution, and channels of the film and television industry are seamlessly integrated in the same company. There is no need for procurement and investment. As long as a revenue-sharing ratio is agreed upon with the creators, a continuous stream of content can be provided to the audience.
High-quality TikTok without the need for shooting, or a UGC Netflix, or even an online Hollywood, there can be many ways to benchmark, but the common point is that they all have mature and stable business ecosystems, waiting for the old and new to change places on the throne.
Although the founders of Pika are not currently discussing similar ambitions, as long as the technology evolves rapidly, everything else will naturally fall into place.
If video generation companies are willing to build a richer ecosystem, they can also open video editing plugins, empower creators to do embedded advertising in videos, adapt exclusive audiovisual systems and spaces… Given that users' habits of paying for entertainment content have long been formed, this may be a more promising system than OpenAI. The ecosystem is always the most valuable, as long as it can withstand the completion of evolution one day.
免责声明：本文章仅代表作者个人观点，不代表本平台的立场和观点。本文章仅供信息分享，不构成对任何人的任何投资建议。用户与作者之间的任何争议，与本平台无关。如网页中刊载的文章或图片涉及侵权，请提供相关的权利证明和身份证明发送邮件到support@aicoin.com，本平台相关工作人员将会进行核查。
