OpenAI, Google, and other AI giants have found a fresh source of training data - they're buying unpublished video directly from content creators.
According to Bloomberg, companies are paying between $1 and $4 per minute, with premium rates for high-quality 4K footage, drone video, and 3D animation. Regular, unused content from platforms like YouTube or TikTok fetches $1-2 per minute. Often, these deals are worth thousands of dollars, Bloomberg writes.
The price of pixels
To handle the licensing logistics, companies are working through specialized firms like Troveo AI and Calliope Networks. Troveo's CEO Marty Pesis says every company developing video models is either already working with them or in talks - and they've already paid creators over $5 million.
Dan Levitt from the Wasserman agency describes the current situation as an arms race for video content. He sees a window for lucrative licensing deals in the coming years, though he cautions it won't stay open forever.
The contracts include safeguards, that AI companies can't create digital copies of the creators, recreate specific scenes from their channels, or use the footage in ways that could harm creators' reputations.
Parallel to buying footage directly, Google recently introduced another play: they've added new features to YouTube letting creators control whether AI companies can use their public videos for training.
The list of potential licensees includes over 17 companies, including OpenAI, Meta, and Microsoft. Because YouTube prohibits unauthorized scraping of content, they're perfectly positioned to act as a middleman and profit from future licensing deals.
The bigger picture
AI companies are hungry for all this video data to build their video generators like Sora and Veo. But some researchers have bigger dreams: they think these massive video datasets could help create a kind of world simulator.
The theory - though scientifically controversial - is that exposure to large amounts of video could help AI systems develop a more profound understanding of physical reality and improve their ability to generalize.
This creates an unexpected windfall for content creators. Many filmmakers produce hundreds of hours of footage annually that never makes it online and previously had zero value. Now they can sell this cutting-room-floor content for actual money.
