AI and video: Disney's OpenAI licensing is an early video sector blueprint

Disney's Entertainment revenues rose 5% year-on-year to $26.0 billion in Q1, although content and marketing costs pressured operating income down (-9%, $4.6 billion). Management outlined its plan to create a Disney+ home for AI content.

Although a very early development, after 18 months of widening, improvements in Disney+'s UK engagement has seen its gap with Netflix contract.

Disney's global marketing reorganisation—including the development of a brand stewardship function led from the top of the company—is a broadly positive move from an outfit laboured with long-entrenched vertical silos. 

The UK broadcasting sector is undecided on how much to engage with a technology that could simultaneously threaten industry jobs, intellectual property, and competitive advantages. Some do not see themselves as in a position to take risks with AI, but the sector must consider the longer-term risks to inaction.

There is clear value to be unlocked along the production pipeline with AI, and unrealised opportunities for content owners to apply AI to their libraries and enhance discovery.

None in the industry can ignore how AI changes the wider competitive landscape: new AI services will provide audiences with alternative products, and disrupt distribution.

Big tech, even the US economy at large, is betting the house on AI. Some air might come out of the bubble, but AI investments’ trajectory will stay the course over the next 24 months.

UK national media and content creators face an acute challenge as they exploit global platforms’ ‘export’ opportunities, with AI’s ‘glocalisation’ potential a key new trend for future online video.

AI platforms could create an even tougher online media environment over the next few years. OpenAI’s spending plans are predicated on resetting how people shop, search and access entertainment.

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The UK’s creative industries are a £124 billion economic powerhouse, and a major net exporter bringing British content to global audiences.

Copyright protection is core to this success, enabling control over production, distribution and monetisation to sustain this thriving creative ecosystem.

AI poses unprecedented challenges through mass scraping of copyrighted content without authorisation or compensation, and creating substitution effects that threaten established business models—making the government’s copyright consultation a critical moment for balancing innovation with creator protection.