Walt Disney’s deal with Open AI looks to the future
of what happens when anyone’s intellectual property by big media companies clashes with sharply rising and needy artificial intelligence (AI) technology platforms.
Some analysts believe the
deal was a good idea -- to settle with one of the major players starting up AI technologies like Open AI that are desperate to access approved, fully copyrighted products to avoid seemingly nonstop
legal hassles.
That said, Disney has placed some major restrictions on this 200 character-licensing deal to OpenAI for its text-to-video Sora platform. Users can create only short-form videos,
no actor likeness or voices, and there are content filters (for political, violence, adult-video, and other issues).
There is history here. IP issues have been around for decades -- for
example, the introduction of VHS tapes, then DVDs, and most recently in the early 2000s with mobile video.
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One analyst says it's sort of a surrender by Disney -- a kind of "if you can’t
beat 'em, join 'em" way of thinking.
Not so, says Bob Iger, CEO of Disney. It looks to the future of
where content is going with digital technologies. He says this follows its breakthrough move to place Disney TV and movie content on Apple iTunes app back in 2005.
Disney is moving to
accelerate what some analysts believe has been a slowdown in monetization of its long-time legendary characters.
In what he says is another obvious trend, Kevin Mayer, ex-senior executive of
Walt Disney and now co-founder/co-CEO of Candle Media, believes it’s all about serving the next generation of entertainment users.
On CNBC, he refers to young millennials and Gen Xers
who are increasingly fascinated by creating their own short-form videos coming from TikTok and other social media platforms -- including that of rising YouTube short-form videos.
Climbing on
this bandwagon, Iger says OpenAI short-form AI content will be curated and placed on its Disney+ platform in some form with this deal.
Most important is the next step -- the effort around
monetization. In other words, advertising dollars.
This is what Disney knows a lot about - - -- something OpenAI, and other big AI-focused companies like Anthropic, Perplexity, and others are
considering: to build platforms with ad-supported options for those still relatively newbie AI platforms -- OpenAI’s original ChatCPT, Google Gemini and xAI’s Grok platforms.
All
this is headed in that direction. Think about what Google Gemini is up to now to synthesize all Google search ad engagement activities into AI.
Some believe that Disney seems to be getting
pulled into this race, somewhat against its will.
But considering the wherewithal Disney has in monetizing its IP now. Being the first major media company to make such a deal gives it a head
start over competitors.
And wait -- isn’t one of its released samples of AI-video content part of this deal from the Pixar movie franchise “Cars”?