If there is such a term right now, it would be AI, the technology we’re constantly told is here whether we like it or not, our needs to water be damned. According to IndieWire, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos told investors on the Q2 earnings call yesterday that the company had used generative AI in 300 titles, ranging from pre-production, to VFX, to set references, to post-production. Netflix hasn’t really been afraid of using generative AI, but 300 still seems like a lot of projects given that Sarandos was confirming the company’s first use of it this time last year.
One show, The American Experiment, included 17 minutes of footage that were adjusted with AI, which Sarandos claims “enabled us to expand the scope of the series in ways that wouldn’t have been feasible before.” (The American Revolution remains a space for testing the capabilities of AI, apparently.) “Those 17 minutes, they were produced twice as fast and at half the cost of previous options,” says Sarandos, emphasizing how much bang investors are getting for their bucks. “Keep in mind that in many of the cases, productions would’ve left out those key shots because they wouldn’t have been able to afford them, they wouldn’t have been able to do them in the time frames that they’re working on,” he said. “So those sequences are saved by the availability and access to the Gen-AI tools.”
Sarandos also offered some of the by-now well-worn talking points about how AI is just a tool that artists can use “to make [their movies] even better.” But of course, this was an earnings call, so saving money is the main thrust here. Said Sarandos, “Content creation timelines can be shortened, and quality can be enhanced, so the cost savings will likely be re-invested into more content on the service, which fuels high quality engagement, and that whole revenue-profit flywheel is going to come from that that we’ve been talking about from Day 1.” Of course, the revenue-profit flywheel that we’re always hearing about.
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