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AI Will Kill the Video Star and Create a Thousand More

Edward Roske
Edward Roske

On August 1, 1981, MTV launched with a Buggles song called “Video Killed the Radio Star.” On December 31, 2025, that same song was the last music video MTV played before shutting down its UK music channels forever. The medium that killed radio was itself killed by streaming.

As my Cylon friends would say: all of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again.

The Talkies Killed 22,000 Musicians in Three Years

Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be, because we forget the bad parts (or blow them out of proportion). Case in point, here’s what nobody talks about when they romanticize old Hollywood:

When “The Jazz Singer” hit theaters in October 1927, every movie theater in America employed live musicians. Pianists. Organists. Full orchestras in the big venues.

By 1929, 22,000 of them were unemployed. The American Federation of Musicians spent the equivalent of $10 million fighting “canned music.” Local 802 in New York printed 50,000 buttons and picketed theaters.

They lost. The public preferred talkies.

That transition took three years. Silent films went from 100% of production to near-zero by 1930. And yes, talkies destroyed careers.

Vilma Banky’s Hungarian accent was unintelligible to American audiences. John Gilbert’s voice didn’t match his romantic persona. Clara Bow hated talkies so much she retired at 26.

But Greta Garbo’s Swedish accent became her signature. Boris Karloff found horror films (which needed sound to work). And within a decade, the movie industry was bigger than it had ever been.

More jobs. Different jobs. Not the same jobs.

MTV Didn’t Kill Music. It Killed Certain Musicians.

MTV launched with 125 videos and access to 2.1 million households. Industry veterans dismissed it. (Sound familiar?)

By 1988, MTV was in 45 million homes, adding 20,000 to 30,000 new households per day. The recorded music industry had been declining from 1978 to 1982. MTV reversed that decline. Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” sold 15 million copies in 1983, driven largely by MTV exposure.

The music industry grew. But the winners changed completely.

If you were a great singer with an unfortunate face (and I say this with love, as someone whose own face is best suited for radio), MTV was bad news. If you were a mediocre singer who looked incredible on camera, MTV was the greatest thing that ever happened to you.

The technology didn’t shrink the pie. It reshuffled who got a slice.

Now Replace “Video” with “AI” and Read It Again

Runway just raised $315 million at a $5.3 billion valuation. Luma AI raised $900 million. Google’s Veo 3.1 produces video that trained observers struggle to identify as AI-generated. Kling 3.0 can generate multi-shot sequences with consistent characters across different camera angles.

The AI video generation market hit $717 million in 2025. It’s projected to reach $3.35 billion by 2034. And those projections are probably conservative (given that every AI projection from 2023 has proven too conservative).

Here’s the cost math that matters. Traditional video production runs $1,000 to $50,000+ per finished minute. AI video generation runs $0.50 to $30 per finished minute. That’s not a marginal improvement. That’s a 99%+ cost reduction.

OpenAI’s animated film “Critterz” cost under $30 million and took 9 months to produce. Traditional animated features cost $100 million and take 3 years. Disney just invested $1 billion in OpenAI and licensed 200 characters from Marvel, Pixar, and Star Wars for AI video generation.

Disney. The most conservative (and litigious, please don’t sue me, Mr. Disney, sir) entertainment company on the planet. They’re not fighting this. They’re licensing their crown jewels to it.

So Where Do the New Jobs Come From?

McKinsey estimates the industry will redistribute $60 billion in entertainment revenue (not destroy it, redistribute it) within five years of mass AI adoption. The World Economic Forum projects the creator economy will approach half a trillion dollars by 2027.

Here’s what that means in practice.

Every technology disruption in entertainment has followed the same pattern: fewer people doing the old thing, more people doing the new thing, and a bigger total market when the dust settles. Streaming killed 153,000 video rental jobs between 2005 and 2015 (a 93%+ decrease). But Netflix alone now employs over 13,000 people, and the streaming ecosystem created hundreds of thousands of jobs that didn’t exist in the Blockbuster era.

AI video will kill the $50,000+ per-minute production model. It will also let a solo creator in Puerto Rico (or anywhere) produce content that would have required a 50-person crew and a $2 million budget five years ago.

The anonymous Hollywood talent agent got it right. He called AI “a tsunami that is gonna wipe out everyone.” Then he said he’s “handing out surfboards.” Teaching people how to surf.

What Should We Be Asking?

Everyone wants to debate whether AI will replace Hollywood. That’s the wrong question. (It’s almost always the wrong question when you frame it as a binary.)

The right question: who benefits from a 99%+ cost reduction in video production?

Not the incumbents who built their business model on expensive production being a barrier to entry. But everyone else. Independent filmmakers. Solo creators. Storytellers in markets that Hollywood ignores. People with great ideas and no budget.

Roger Avary won an Oscar for co-writing “Pulp Fiction.” He couldn’t get a movie made through traditional channels. After launching an AI production company, he has three features in active production. “All of a sudden,” he said, “boom, like that, money gets thrown at it.”

The video star will die. A thousand new ones will take its place.

(And they’ll probably be more interesting than the ones we have now. But that’s not legally binding, of course.)

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