Welcome to another episode of Strictly Business, the podcast in which we speak with some of the brightest minds working in the media business today. I'm Andrew Wallenstein, chief insights officer at Illuminate and a variety contributor. Disney is embracing
a super app strategy. That's what new CEO Josh Tomorrow signaled last week, sharing his vision for evolving Disney Plus into what he referred to as a quote immersive, interactive, digital centerpiece end quote that brings together everything from theme park tickets to merchandise and much more. Sounds fascinating and also the perfect home for a feature the company, up until very recently, was poised to include the ability to allow consumers to make their own videos with Disney IP
from Mickey Mouse to Princess Leiah. That, however, is no longer the case, considering open AI's stunning announcement back in March that it was ending its partnership with Disney and discontinuing the Sora app that would have used the magic of AI to let fans bring more than two hundred Disney characters to life. And that leaves a question I've been asking myself ever since, with or without Disney Plus or Open AI, will we ever see realize the groundbreaking
potential their deal promised to unlock. To help me sort through this, I've enlisted Jeremy Toeman, SVP of AI Innovation at JWX, the video technology platform for publishers. He is just the right person to hash this out with me because he doesn't just know AI, he's got more than thirty years of experience building media tech and convergence products at companies like Warner Brothers, CBS, and numerous startups.
Thanks for talking with me, Jeremy, It's good to see Andrew. Good to see you.
And let me ask you right off the bat.
Were you a Sora user at all?
Did?
What did you think of it?
What did you do with it? Yeah?
I jumped on the platform because the truth is I started building an AI video startup, not in the generative space, but in the video editing side of things before Chat to BT and Etcetera launched and so ever since kind of this LLM revolution happened and jen A I became feasible, I've been wanting to play with every tool that's out there, both for personal use and to figure out business opportunities. What bets would I make, wouldn't I make?
You know?
And and so I got a chance to play with Sora. I had a lot of fun exploring it. I'll be honest, I think sure. The craziest thing to me is how much we saw examples of like insane creativity combined with just like wrote you know, the most basic prompt ever kind of thing.
Sure, sure, I mean I have to confess I wasn't a regular user, but I used it enough to really be entranced by the possibilities, particularly when Disney entered the picture. I thought the notion that fans could make their own short videos using characters, the notion that some of these videos would eventually find a place on Disney Plus really interesting, and if done right, I thought it could open up
a whole new revenue stream. But just the same I also couldn't get my head around exactly how this would possibly work, given how protective Disney is of its IP. Did any of these things strike you as well? Oh?
Absolutely, I'll be honest.
Even Disney's a particular example because they are so they are so protective of their IP. But the truth is, you could pick almost any IP and start scratching your head pretty quickly at the what if we let anybody do anything with this?
Right?
And you see some area, some creators, etc. Where fanfic et cetera is is sort of part. It's like the de regard. It's part of the culture.
And there are other.
Areas where it's like, ooh, that would make me really uncomfortable to see something weird happen here. You know, it is very reminiscent of me in the mid nineties working at a local video store that had the beaded curtain adult room and that people would every now and then have the parody versions of mainstream movies. So to me, it was like that was the first thing that jumped in my head, is all of those crazy titles coming to life. And I don't think most IP holders really want to see that.
No, yes, I can only imagine what certain minds would do to Mickey Mouse and other characters of great purity. But I always figured what we would see is Disney would put I do hate to use the word restrictive, because I'm sympathetic to where they're coming from, but to me, it was like they would sort of maybe you know, strangle the baby and the crib, so to speak. Put too much controls on it, and then it's like, well, will anyone want to use this?
Yeah, I think you're dead on right, And that's where the tricky nuance comes in.
One thing I noticed using sora is it was very quick.
It was very very quick to see users in the comment section just lamb basing open AI for any restrictions. It was like the fact that you couldn't show I don't know, Mickey Mouse murdering somebody or some ridiculous thing, right.
The fact that you weren't allowed to show that was offending people from day one, Like there was over all across the comment section, and people were actually making videos of Sam Altman like deliberately like restricting content creation, etc. So I can only imagine if they actually had been given the floodgate to hey, do something cool with iron Man or or whoever, but not too cool. These are your you know, you you can have iron Man, you know, fight bad guys, but you cannot have iron Man fight
say Mickey Mouse or something like. I don't know, I don't know where the rules would be. Could you make it like like the like the punch Out. Could you make it like so comedic that it that it goes into satire and it's actually kind of funny. Or are you're still going to be stepping onlines and it's a it's a huge question.
Yeah.
And so I thought where this was going to go was that the version of Sora that we saw, which I don't want to I don't want to give.
A short shrift.
I thought there was a lot to commend for sort of a first wave product could subsist.
But just deprived.
Well, let me ask you, do you feel that there was a version of Sora that could have worked just without any actual I p except for brave souls like mister Altman who was willing to put his own face out there.
I saw works of creativity people were doing, like fantasy and sci fi like I saw inventive ships, space stuff and stars and cosmic patterns. And then I saw other things like people bringing like food to life, and we've actually seen those, like those Pixar style foody things. I think they've gotten a little too Pixar style to be canon.
But I definitely saw people doing creative things. I also saw creative use of sort of the retro cams, like people opening kids of the Christmas tree in the seventies kind of style era things people doing like clever takes on a ring, security camera catching like a unicorn running
by and stuff like that. But I you know those ones took real effort, and so I think this also goes into this whole what's wrong slash right about Generator TODAYI is that low effort content is quickly going into our slop bucket, which we which I don't think it's even bucket sized anymore. It's now like a slop ocean of sorts. But those who are using the tools with true creativity and like figuring out how do I make my skeleton creature thing haunt the night and with eerie
music like, I love seeing some of that stuff. So I hope we aren't in the baby with the bathwater stage of things.
I mean, look, we know that open Ai made the decision to kill to kill Sora for reasons. It probably had nothing to do with what was going on on the platform itself. They had to be focused on that IPO.
They are cost issues, no question. But I guess the disappearance of Sore from the marketplace makes me wonder whether do you think that there is a vacuum that can be filled or maybe maybe you and I are being too generous here and it's withdrawal is a testament to the reality that maybe there was no mark that Sora made and it just wasn't really a product.
I don't know that I'm going to agree with that one. I think there's something, there's a there there. I don't yet know what it is. I look at the analogy, as you know, we once drew on caves with sticks that we that were burnt, and that was the beginning of drawing, right, and there was a time where crayons were new technology. And then if we fast forward to the nineties, a little tool called render Man by of
course Pixar changed the game yet again. And nowadays when we look at some of the movies, whether it's did you ever see Kubo in the Two Strings?
I believe it was called I've heard of it, but I haven't seen it.
Yeah, it was a style of animation I'd never seen before. Gorgeous requires computers to make it all work. So I do think that the notion that a creative person could use AI to generate the thing they want to see, it's sort of the latest version of these tools. Right, we're moving from a person has to learn and had to do three D rendering and modeling and etc.
To prompt your way there.
The problem with all these things is by taking out both the guardrails as well as sort of the work to be done. You know, maybe it's we made it too cheap, right. Maybe you know my daughter is studying design at Rizdy and she has to go buy art supplies, and so if she's going to go buy some paint, she has to decide is this like for the final project or am I just sort of sketching around? And if I'm just sketching around, what kind of texture do
I want? And things like that. So I wonder if we need certain different kinds of tools and instruments that work with the creators to let them explore interesting stuff. I do think if I had to make the choice of there's no more slop, but there's also no more generative, I think I might make that choice, at least in the today of decisions. I might regret saying that one day, but I think we'd rather see high caliber put that's not being doubted right Like now, every video someone sends
me of like Cat's doing weird things at night. The first comment is ai ai ai, and you know maybe it was.
I don't know.
Yeah, I mean when you when you use the example of your daughter, I do wonder whether maybe the version of Sora that is meant to be and one that is inclusive of IP is something that is more sort of like a professional class product that people would pay for and not what the Sora we knew meant to be, which was throw the doors open, let everyone do what they want for free. What do you think of that.
We should be experimenting with that? I think the missing part of it all, and this goes to where slop is coming from, is the notion of curation. Right, slop works because it's profitable, just the same for the slopper. I guess it's sort of like spam.
You know.
My kids asked me why, well, why do we get like why spam? And I'm like, well, because if you send the same thing to ten million people and one of them clicks.
It was a prophet, that's the answer. Right.
The same is good is true in slop the first person too. And if you sell you we did the video. There's a bunch of these styles now where someone will run around from sort of room to room taking a selfie with like yeah, yeah, like the first person who did that. It's creative, it's interesting. It's like the first all white painting. I don't remember what that's called that,
or the banana duct tape to the wall. But if you come into my house and I just go duct tape a bunch of fruit to the wall, you know, I'm sort of doing a different version of the slop And I would argue that the same thing's true digitally. So as long as we sort of can say, well, slop goes here, quality stuff goes here, creators go there.
Right.
If there's a combination of like a Patreon and a Sora where you know there's an incentive in place to not make more slop, that's a probably a good thing. And at the same time, I don't want to overly burn and artists who are trying to create. So it's like Facebook said, it's complicated.
Sure, well, you know, I think the when you're describing it that way, it doesn't even sound all that different than say a YouTube, where there are some very small percentage that are the creators and the rest are basically the audience. I'm probably oversimplifying it, though.
You're dead on right, Like, there's been this historic ratio of one percent create, one to two percent create, eight to nine percent engage that's some form of commenting, re sharing, doing something, and then about ninety percent just consume and lurk and do very little. And that's been true since I wrote my first blog post twenty something years ago.
Is that that's those are the ratios.
And when I was looking at Sora engagement, one of the things I noticed is commenting was really low, right, So my hunch is what was going wrong sort of
the wrong pyramid of sorts was being formed. Is that way too many people creating lots of audience and not of that, not a lot of that true deep engagement or like like I would follow people who I thought made cool stuff, but then that might have been the only thing they ever did on sore and maybe they used up all their credits or I don't know what happened, right, So I think maybe we need and by need, I wonder what will be the system that evolves into that, right,
like YouTube could have a YouTube.
AI only zone.
I think I think this is one suggestion I make is that you know, much like I remember being in the days where you go to a restaurant or an airplane, there'd be a cigarette section that did its job fairly well. I wonder if YouTube probably has the right strength of brand to pull off a AI stuffs that over here if you want to, it's all over here. Enjoy, here's AI remixes, here's AI real life things, here's AI animations here, et cetera.
That could probably work, and then let people make their choices. And let's because we do need people to have time with all this media to figure out what we do with it.
Right, Yeah, I think you're onto something there. I think that, you know, especially when we put this in the in the context of like a Disney plus and where this could have lived. I don't think the way SOA was was there is just one and only functionality that exists, and that is the raison to etra of the entire platform, when in fact it probably should be one of a number of things, and that's how it perhaps could have worked on a on a Disney or YouTube as you
put it. I mean, to some degree, I think what we're talking about here is the classic quibi mistake, where you know quibis we've got to that point of the podcast. We must mention Quibi where you know, maybe Quibi if if the content was good, and I know that's a debate and of itself. If the content was good, there would have been a business there. If it wasn't just that content, if it existed along the side of other things.
I fully agree.
I mean it, look, it's hard to argue, especially at this stage of the evolution of the media, that we actually needed Quiby as its own sort of bespoke app If Quibi had instead simply been like a fast network and they had had microdramas on TikTok, which are obviously now trending and doing very well, and had the fire TV had a channel there like they didn't have to do
like the rotating tech and all these other things. Those weren't necessary, right If they had just gotten the content mixed together, that could have been really interesting.
But to your point, this.
Is these sort of a siloed, monolithic kind of approaches. I wonder if Sora would have been better off if they had hand picked users, gone to places like DV and tard and read it and find people who are off creating things in their own time, and and welcome them in as a new tool to explore and help us get it right right. I think there's a there is an opportunity here, but it takes a lot of thoughtfulness.
It's not a mass blast approach. The notion of guardrails and some usage limitation isn't a bad thing necessarily, right, But when you then tell the whole world they can't have Superman beating up Minnie Mouse being watched by Bell from you to to be, you can't have that combo that that just consumer or end users don't want to deal with that.
The stickiness there.
At a company I was want one of the media companies I once worked at, we had been envisioning building a tool that would let a person come into a special office we had and basically deep fake themselves into one of our IP properties. I think that's fun. I
think being able to walk a ready again. I'll just use the same example like if I can make me look be the Superman in the actual Superman movie and fighting off the beasts or whatever, and it actually looks cool and I can get that as a thirty second clip to share with my kids, that's fun.
You know, that feels like fun?
Use of this technology right, like photo booth style, you know.
But totally and by the way, I mean, that was what SOA was to some degree, you had the ability to inject yourself into these videos. I first of all, let me ask you, did you do that? Did you put yourself into any of it?
I refuse to, Yeah, I refuse to put up my own I assume the internet has all my personal info to begin with already. I just felt like the three D rendering of my face might be the last thing I don't want to give up to a company that has not yet announced any form of what motivates them, or their their guidelines or their own guardrails, which seem to be I felt like I could skip that one.
But you did it. Huh.
Yeah, I mean, you're far smarter and more sensible than I am. I just at first I did not for the same reasons that you did. And then I just broke down because I was so entranced by the thought of, well would I look like doing this, and what would I look like that, you know, precautions be damned. Luckily, at least at this point, I don't think anyone is having their way with my likeness in an inappropriate way. But I do think this is where this technology goes.
That the deep thinking yourself into interactions with characters is uniquely powerful.
Totally agreed, like, why how far are we from like someone making a choose your own adventure game that is all video, it's all generative, it's all using just upload a couple of things here and there, and now you're in this you're looking for the sacred idol on the temple or whatever other thing. I'm curious, Andrew, how was you? How were the videos you were able to make with yourself in them?
It was fascinating. They ran the gamut. Some of them were like, Okay, I don't look like that, so what's going on here?
And then there were.
Others where I was like, oh my god, this is eerie and look, I never look. You make a video, you publish it on the platform, anyone could see it. But it wasn't like I was deliberately trying to shine a light on it. I was literally just like making the link, sending it to some friends and family and they got a good laugh out of it. But yeah, there's a version of maybe I wouldn't be laughing if it got into the wrong hand.
It's a fun time. I mean, I love seeing all this tech coming out. There are other platforms people can play with, by the way, So if you're listening and you still want to be playing with AI Video, which I don't blame you, Google Video's really interesting and powerful. You can do a lot of stuff these days now with Claw and Canva too, by the way, Canva and even the Adobe has some pretty good video generation stuff. So definitely go play around a little and see what
do you think of it. How do we embrace how do we get a new generation of brad Birds and other picks? And the picks are creatives, so that we're just making whether it's infotainment, entertainment, whatever, the thing is that we're giving people more to enjoy as opposed to things that they instantly reject, right I maybe it was an uncanny Valley thing, you know. I don't know yet, it's too soon to tell.
That brings me back to sort of the very premise of this conversation, which is I cannot help wondering whether the dissolution of Disney and Open Ai and Sora, there's still a vacuum in this marketplace and maybe some of the very players you just mentioned are going to walk into it. And they're gonna do so hand in hand with If not Disney, maybe it's Powa Amount, maybe it's lions Gate. What do you think?
One thing I definitely believe is that I think if so proved Soura as an experiment proved something other than the We don't want slop.
We want curation, all the stuff about what makes content good.
I also wonder if we have become if we are just sort of done with new platforms to be on right, Like, would people have taken more to SOA if it was embedded inside say a TikTok right or or an HBO Max or a Powerment or any of these apps. And I don't know, right it does seem like a centralized app for slop is not a good idea, right, But do we want it distribute it everywhere? Do we want each brand to let their audiences play with their content in a way like Disney Plus you made a good example.
I see it on all of the platforms now. Is that it's aligning all of my things together, right, which is fun and good and helpful. By the way, I'd love to get report updates on just when my hockey team's playing. I don't need all the rest. I don't know if it needs a dedicated home. I think that's an The big question in the mix is is it sort of more like email where you just you just have a client of You can use Gmail, hot Mail, AOL, if your old school web, you can use lots of
different apps to do it all. You can have an iCloud account, you know. Is so is genet Video almost more like a protocol, like just something that's just there for all the stuff? Or does it need dedicated places? And that's again too soon to tell.
I think yeah, I mean I'm wondering though you know, we've talked about this notion about it can't be sort of the sole reason for putting a platform out there needs to be embedded out there. But are there other things that you think a media company or a hyper scaler may want to experiment with in terms of a different approach than what little we knew about what Disney and open AI we're going to do.
Oh I think at least one of them should play with things like deep baking and remixing and doing it maybe in an isolated maybe in a place where you can't you know, it's in some kind of walled garden or gated community where there are some controls in place. And I think this is also a key thing, is somehow we need to get the message to the users that, like, like people worked hard to create IP, respecting IP.
Matters, don't blow it all up.
Use it in a way that's that's healthy in advancing the medium, not sort of pillaging from it. And I do think there's a line in there that really does matter. But I think to your point, like letting the let's see the new Mandalorian movies coming out. We know that the Mandalorian was entirely done with new digital sets and et cetera, seems like an opportune place for like a whether it's maybe it's a game, right, maybe we're using
generative stuff inside gaming. I think about some of those games that came out a few years ago, was called Spawn. I believe it was called where you can sort of make your own creature and every creature was perfectly unique in some way. Like those are kind of neat things to experiment with. What what does general video bring to that?
So maybe we don't need an app that we can just prompt have a unicorn run by my ring camera, but we do need general video to get woven inside other tools and technologies we're using all the time.
That's an interesting suggestion. I hadn't even thought about it in the context of gaming, But who's to say that gaming isn't the place where this might take off as opposed to we've been talking about just video all along, and I think there's something to that.
I'll tell you another area that I think is interesting, like what about being able to use general video for yourself, like for a personal training app, for style apps, for those haircutting apps, right, or use generat video to project what a recipe's going to look like. There's a lot of things we could do where the tech itself brings value along the journey. Maybe it's just a sort of again, not a destination app, but an ingredient of one.
But another good point maybe that these videos are less random, mindless entertainment but actually very utilitarian, very specific neat use cases like hey, I want to know I'm going to look like with this haircut or with these clothes on, And I just go back to there was something in Sora that entranced me to the point where I was like, this can't be the end point just because AI doesn't want to do it this way. But I mean, have
you ruled out open AI from this? Do you think they're the IPO version of them means where they're not going to play in this playground Again.
Well, again, we don't know all the reasons why a shutdown happen, So if anything had to do with things like copyright and lawsuit my hunches, we don't see it.
Again.
If, on the other hand, it was maybe the Apples was costing more than it was making, which is probable just based on how much you could do for free, including on the consumption side, So maybe it was a cost structure. Maybe it was a conservative move in advance. They shut down a few other things in a similar timeframe, but they did it in a way where it didn't seem like, oh, we're just killing all these other projects.
But reality is, in like forty five days, they killed at least five things that they were that they had announced. So maybe it was just sort of tightening the ship up in advance of IPOs et cetera. I read rumors like they have too many products, they need to be more focused. If there were a lot of things we don't really know, that could be the thing. Personally, my gut talks a bit, but sits in the copyright slash costs. You know, ven diagram of that is terrible.
Sure, although you know, we'll never really know what Disney thought of, what little work went into the partnership that they had. Part of me does wonder when you bring up copyright whether lawyers were whisp we're in in Josh Tomorrow's ear like, there's no version of this that is going to not get us into legal hot water. But we'll never know.
We have the Internet, so every bit of me assumes that that no matter what rules are put in, somebody would be on the crusade to do something with Mickey and Minnie like it. Just it's too obvious, you know what I mean? And like and if there's one thing I've ever learned is that no matter how many locks you put in place, there are keys. Right, So somebody had figured out that video would leak and that would be a day of reckoning, per se.
No truer words have been spoken about the nature of the Internet. Jeremy, thank you very much for talking to me through this. Perhaps we'll have another conversation at some point, not in the distant future, where we are seeing what this next iteration is, and we'll be able to assess whether this is a move in the right direction for a technology that I think it's just too interesting to just vanish.
Well.
See, I'm very curious to see how many things we were wrong about. No later than thirty days from today. That's at the pace this world's moving. I have a hunch we'll know a lot more. You know, any rolling thirty day.
Basis absolutely okay.
Thanks again, thanks for listening. Be sure to leave us a review at the podcast platform of your choice. We love to hear from listeners. Please go to Variety dot com to sign up for the free weekly Strictly Business newsletter, and don't forget to tune in next week for another episode of Strictly Business.