TCL Is Going to Generate and Stream A.I. Movies to Its Televisions for Targeted Advertising ⇥ 404media.co
Jason Koebler, 404 Media:
TCL said it expects to sell 43 million televisions this year. To augment the revenue from its TV sales, it has created a free TV service called TCL+, which is supported by targeted advertising. A few months ago, TCL announced the creation of the TCL Film Machine, which is a studio that is creating AI-generated films that will run on TCL+. TCL invited me to the TCL Chinese Theater, which it now owns, to watch the first five AI-generated films that will air on TCL+ starting this week.
What an extraordinary paragraph. Tired of movies feeling increasingly derivative? Too bad; here are some that literally — by definition — are entirely so. You can watch all five on YouTube if you really want.
They are, with the exception of the visuals, short movies like any other. They were apparently written, directed, voice acted, and edited by real people. How long do you think TCL will maintain that level of investment?
As for the obviously terrible quality, Jason brings up the ol’ “this is the worst it will ever be” chestnut, and [TCL’s] Chris agrees, and elaborates. What’s left unsaid with TCL’s approach is that this is the best the TCL Channel will ever be, because it’s optimizing for this quality level. They’re setting this as the bar. If Chris is to be believed, and that TCL will always employ roughly this same number of people to make something, then that would indicate to me that they’ll simply be able to make more videos of this quality, not the same number of videos at a higher quality.
In a world of slop and content, these truly seem like both. I feel a little uncomfortable writing that because people worked on them, but that is how they come across. All programming on broadcast television is, to some extent, the thing luring you in so you will also watch some ads. These movies are not that. Regardless of the technology behind them, they are simply poor movies. They are not much fun to watch and I am not sure why I would sit through ad breaks to see anything like these shorts.
In some sense, they function in basically the same way as A.I. TikTok spam. They can be produced at volume as TCL inevitably relies less on the human involvement in these examples. But would you rather watch Letterman re-runs instead?