If I had to pick two stories from this week’s Upfronts that are emblematic of major changes in the industry, they would be Canela’s new microdrama app, Zully, and Amazon’s focus on commerce. Zully is in many ways the more important of the two stories as it is the forerunner of a whole new era of content creation. It was something I had predicted last August, though honestly it was not all that prescient — my premise was that AI actors could not be much worse than the real ones and that, more than that, the audiences would not really care if the actors looked slightly unreal. That it was all part of the vibe. So kudos to Canela for realizing that the tech was ready and rolling out an app that uses AI to produce a series of original microdramas, many of them Latino-themed adaptations of classics like Pride and Prejudice. Why It Matters AI video is having a moment in the political arena which meant that it was only a matter of time before it migrated elsewhere. Cases in point: the Iranian Lego videos and Spencer Pratt’s LA mayoral campaign. Microdramas are well-suited to AI because they rely on close-ups and exaggerated facial expressions rather than beautiful scenery and artfully lit backdrops. Studios, like the one Zully is using in Mexico, can crank them out at warp speed and even make adjustments on the fly. Meaning you can A/B test different storylines in real time to see which one is doing better. Make different versions for different regions by tweaking the way the actors look or even their accents. It’s not art, but it’s not supposed to be. Zully was a particularly smart move for Canela Studios, which produces streaming content aimed at Latino audiences in the U.S. That’s because Zully, with its Spanish language microdramas, can be deployed all across Latin America, which is a prime market for this sort of content. What’s more, Zully can be promoted all across Canela’s content line-up, thus solving one of the biggest problems for all of the emerging microdrama apps: how do you promote it? So that is all that is good about Zully and it’s easy to see how this sort of production capability then migrates to other categories too: soap operas/ telenovelas/ K-dramas/ dizis are easy, then non-fiction TV shows, then, eventually comedies and dramas. Will AI write the scripts too? People may not want to hear this, but for many of the categories it eventually will. Not all of them—high production value dramas and comedies will still be written by humans. And if you are about to send off an angry comment, ask yourself if House Hunters really needs to be written by an actual human. What You Need To Do About It If you are Canela, take a bow. Getting out there first with something that is likely to become table stakes is a big win, provided the shows are what the audience actually wants, which is still a big risk. But the rest of the industry is not far behind you: Janko Roettgers is reporting today that Netflix is busy making AI-created animation. And if Netflix is doing it, everyone else can’t be too far behind. If you are the rest of the industry, I suspect that I am correct, that none of you are all that far behind Canela. But if you are not, then WTF? If you are considering an acting or writing career, realize that this is both good and bad news. On the one hand, you don't really want to be the one writing or acting in these sorts of shows. On the other, they do serve as an easy source of income in hard times. Everything is a trade-off. |
