A tech giant gave a vote of confidence to a new product that could revolutionize animated TV creation… or maybe just lead to some crazy fan fiction.
Driving the news: Amazon invested an undisclosed amount in media startup Fable Studio, providing funding to scale up Showrunner, the company’s AI-generated streaming service that made its public debut this week. In closed testing, the service had 10,000 users.
- Showrunner lets users input prompts to generate custom scenes from original animated shows that exist on the platform, or to create their own scenes.
- It’s currently free to use as it continues testing, but eventually plans to drive income by selling credits that will cost US$10 to $20.
Why it matters: Many evangelists believe genAI will democratize media production. But if you’ve seen any TV shows lately, making good content is hard. Instead, Fable envisions Showrunner mainly as a service for users to play around with existing hits — the company showed this in early testing by making fake South Park episodes. This realist view of genAI content could be attractive to studios.
- “Our idea is that [the] ‘Toy Story of AI’ would be playable, with millions of new scenes, all owned by Disney,” Fable CEO Edward Saatchi told Variety.
Yes, but: The idea that the likes of Disney would let highly valuable IP fall into the hands of common folk, even if Fable paid steep licensing fees, is a little hard to believe.—QH