AI Is Eating TV, Powered By Google

VEO 3 from Google credit The Dor Brothers

People seem to forget that Google—like Meta, Amazon and Netflix — is fundamentally an AI company that used machine learning to change how content and commerce is discovered, shared, monetized, and created.

For decades, Google fumbled at cracking TV. Then it made android, the operating system for TV and mobile and slowly but also seemingly overnight, YouTube went from a web based behavior to the most streamed platform on TV.

Google started by mastering a journey from intent in search and its carried its way to the biggest screen in the house.

Studios and programmers are just getting used to accepting they have to surrender pay TV subscriptions and linear ad dollars to earn streaming quarters are now (finally) realizing that to even reach major populations on an actual TV, they need to push their IP to Google’s YouTube and TikTok (where the content is yielding ad sense cents.)

So now, not only do the economics mostly suck for TV publishers, but predictability and brand safety goes out the window. The viewer journey is dynamic and algorithmic, so million dollar production clips are followed by iPhone clips of, well whatever else you may like. Or something more nefarious.

For studios, no amount of tune in-marketing can fundamentally change the age-old supply and demand principle: people want what they want and you deliver it or die. That doesn’t always mean narrative, it means emotion.

But it gets worse for Hollywood. When you look at leaderboards on YouTube, it’s not just programming and home grown influencers that own the key verticals, it’s AI-generated meme garbage. The sugar of video - you know its crap but you’ll have just one more.

So, not only do we have premium content that is written, directed, produced and staffed by real humans now competing against content done by a bro in a basement and addictive trojan horse propaganda from some warehouse in Asia — the value of viewership and what constitutes an ad impressions are further distributed and diminished.

The TV industrial complex is already being unraveled, now for the paradigm shift.

Enter Veo 3, the most profound generative video production platform to date, which immediately gives rise to the “best” deep fake humanity has ever seen. What does it mean for Hollywood? What happens to the creators?

Perhaps fittingly, this sample kind of sums it all up. Enjoy.