Covering Hollywood and AI. I wrote about The real reason OpenAI acquired it to be decided,suddenly Sora’s death, val kilmerPosthumous movie appearance with AI support, Ben Affleck sells AI company Netflix and the entertainment industry are in meltdown ByteDance’s SeaDance.
This past year, Hollywood is thinking hard about what AI can and cannot do in text-to-video and storytelling. On Sunday, I was on a panel at the NAB show that I moderated for Ankler. Bryn Muser (Asteria Representative Director), Christina Lee Storm (Secret Level Studio Manager) and Michael Lofaso (Co-CEO Dan Lin(Rideback and Spuree) — I had a chance to ask experts who are making huge investments in AI video production whether “Hollywood is cooking.” (This lively panel will soon be available on Ankler’s YouTube channel.) While we didn’t come to a consensus on how cooked Hollywood is, we took a deep dive into the rapidly changing category of AI content.
For a brief moment this spring, it seemed like text-to-video conversion was finally being solved into something the industry understood. Sora, the product that carried much of the weight and publicity of the category, was being phased out. OpenAI announces closure Disney, which had signed a three-year character licensing deal with OpenAI and was preparing to take a $1 billion stake in the company, pulled out of the two companies. The remaining players had categorized themselves into what appeared to be a pecking order according to different needs. Grok was up front with meme creators and consumers, the pro-class runway was in the middle, Kling and Google’s Veo with a variety of audiences behind them, and Sora’s orphan users sprinkled in the rest.
And through all this, there was a sense of creative schadenfreude, the glee of AI slop overcome by “good” storytelling. Text-to-video conversion was a moribund and depressing era that should be forgotten.
That’s a proper story. That’s also wrong.
Text-to-Video is not a stable product category. It is spreading across a range of features.
What once seemed like a coherent market, with platforms competing to define AI-generated video, is beginning to disintegrate. The underlying functionality is built into three very different environments: social networks, creator workflows, and professional production tools.
This change is important because it changes the question. The question is no longer about which platform will win. It’s where technology takes hold, and how it behaves differently when embedded within systems built for distribution, scale, and control.
Of the remaining players, Grok accounts for the largest observed AI video tool traffic, according to Artificial Analysis, while Runway, Google’s Veo and Flow, and Kling all have significant minority stakes, with the rest fragmented into smaller platforms. These numbers are imperfect metrics and not production audits, but they are consistent in important ways. That is, no single platform has achieved category dominance, and no unified market structure has formed around text-to-video integration at all.
This lack of integration may be a defining feature of how these tools are used in the future. Not as a single industry, but as several fragmented industries, each serving a different master.
In today’s column, we’ll look at three of them: Grok, Kling, and Runway. Not because they’re the only ones left, but because each has a different answer to the question of Sora’s downfall remaining up in the air. Where does AI video actually live? Grok lives in your feed. Kling lives in the creator pipeline. The runway is in the edit bay. And Hollywood should focus less on the quality of the work and more on the distance between these three locations.
More details below.
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Why runway is the only tool to really make it into Hollywood’s edit bay
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What legacy producers stand up to when the competition is not just cheaper, but a completely different game
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What is Grok actually for and why? Elon Musk‘s “movie by 2027” rhetoric misses the point.
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How Kling is quietly industrializing short-form video and how the creator economy is driving its rise
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The existing platforms for each of these platforms are actually finding
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Why there won’t be a single AI video winner, and why it’s even worse for Hollywood
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How three different economies – feeds, creators, and studios – are pulling video in contradictory directions.
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