AI Film Needs Infrastructure, Not Just Better Tools

01 /The Concept

Most AI film tools are in the business of making video easier to generate. The AI Film Company is doing something different: building the legal and financial infrastructure for what happens after the video exists – specifically rights management and royalty automation for film and video production.

The insight behind the company is this: existing AI video creation and editing tools are making it trivially easy for anyone to produce content based on existing stories and characters from those stories. Theoretically this can be fought. Practically, the battlefield has become too large for any individual player to defend.

So the better question isn't how to stop it – it's how to structure it and profit from it. Specifically:

- How do you preserve intellectual property rights on individual creative elements as they migrate across user versions and remixes?

- How do you track that usage?

- How do you automate royalty payments to the rights holders?

The traditional "license every use individually" model collapses at consumer scale. So The AI Film Company set out to build not another video creation tool, but a digital platform for "structuring intellectual property rights in the AI era."

The platform's centerpiece is a new file format:.dave. Films are packaged into.dave files – but the format doesn't replace existing video codecs. Standard video (MP4, MOV, WMV, etc.) sits inside the container. What the.dave format adds is a provenance layer: embedded metadata identifying who contributed what and when. This metadata accumulates through every edit, creating a persistent, auditable record of creative authorship at the element level.

Think of it as a set of tags that are automatically attached to created or edited video – tags that can't simply be deleted or modified, because doing so breaks the file's ability to be played or edited.

A useful analog is DRM protection, similar to what Amazon uses for Kindle ebooks. But.dave goes further in two ways. First, third-party platforms can read and edit.dave files – it's not a walled garden. Second, the rights metadata is far more granular: individual rights can be assigned to specific characters, scenes, designs, or any other discrete element inside the file. The embedded rights layer also includes licensing conditions, attribution rules, and other details, enabling fully automated rights management.

And as the final layer: every view of a.dave file is tracked and logged by the platform. This means automatic, auditable royalty payments to every contributor of every element within the file, according to their pre-set license terms. The same data can be used for audits and copyright disputes.

Beyond developing the.dave format, The AI Film Company also produces original AI films. In early September, it licensed one of those films to Showrunner ([covered here](/review/kak-budet-vygljadet-novyj-netfliks-jepohi-ii)) – which is how this company came to attention. Showrunner's platform is built precisely to let users create derivative content from films and series uploaded to the platform, making the two companies natural partners.

The AI Film Company was founded in 2023 with $5M in initial funding.

02 /Why It Matters

AI video is going to cause a tectonic shift in film production. What's visible now is only the distant rumble of what's coming. The scale of this shift is comparable to the kind of disruption that historically wipes out category incumbents – and in this case, those incumbents are the major studios.

Blockbusters and quality film production used to be the exclusive territory of studios because the process was slow, expensive, and technically complex. AI video collapses all three barriers. The craft that required a $200M budget and two years of production is rapidly becoming something any individual or small team can attempt.

Film production is transitioning from elite to mass market. The same revolution happened in media: for decades, media was controlled by conglomerates running print publications. Then the internet turned everyone into a publisher – bloggers, newsletter writers, social accounts, YouTube shows, TikTok series. The infrastructure for that transition – blogging platforms, social networks, newsletter tools – was built by startups.

The same infrastructure wave is now forming around AI video. And it's already producing notable early examples.

Showrunner ([covered here](/review/kak-budet-vygljadet-novyj-netfliks-jepohi-ii)) raised undisclosed strategic funding from Amazon in July. Its platform lets users create their own episodes within uploaded "video universes" built on a film or franchise. The founder's vision: "People watch a film Friday night – by Sunday, thousands of fan-made episodes featuring those characters are live on Showrunner."

Chronicle ([covered here](/review/zachem-tolkatsja-zhopami-na-starom-rynke-startapov)) raised $11.6M in June to build a venture fund for AI video creators. The thesis: individual creators can develop compelling characters and stories that go viral, which can then be packaged as franchises and sold to larger players. The franchise model already prints money – Despicable Me, Shrek, Toy Story have each generated $3–5B for their creators and licensees. What changes now is that AI lets individuals or small teams originate those franchises, not just studios.

03 /Opportunities

Film production is about to become a mass-market industry – and whenever a market undergoes a structural transformation like this, it's exactly the moment to build a startup in the space.

A rising market multiplies your efforts. The size of your outcome equals your own work multiplied by the growth rate of the market itself.

And like any rapidly growing market, this one has too many open opportunities to enumerate. Whichever direction you point, something will take root. The only question is how much.

Even something as seemingly minor as registering trademarks on AI-generated characters could become a highly lucrative niche – if character creation accelerates to the scale of domain registration, the asset values and licensing opportunities could be substantial

That's not a recommendation to pursue that specific path – just an illustration of how many angles remain wide open. The most tractable entry point is probably the B2B side: helping studios, independent filmmakers, and platforms automate the rights management they currently do manually – or avoid entirely, at their legal peril.