When Hollywood’s Catalog Isn’t Enough and Might Need AI Licensing

Lionsgate thought they had this figured out.

The studio that owns John Wick, Twilight, and The Hunger Games partnered with Runway AI in 2025 to build custom video models. The vision? Type “anime version of John Wick” and watch AI generate it from their catalog.

That was around June 2025. Last week, the experiment quietly closed.

The problem wasn’t incompetence, it was scale.

Sources told The Wrap that “the Lionsgate catalog is too small to create a model.” Even Disney’s catalog was considered insufficient.

Let’s do the math: 8,000 movies at roughly 2 hours each equals 16,000 hours.

Add 9,000 other titles averaging 1 hour, and you’re at maybe 25,000 hours total.

Double that generously to 50,000 hours.

Still not enough.

AI companies are running out of training data after burning through the entire internet. Video. Real, diverse, messy human video has become a bottleneck.

While Lionsgate struggled with insufficient data, one Troveo client was reportedly in the market for 50,000 hours of dog videos because their AI-generated dogs kept coming out with cat bodies.

That’s not a business model. That’s market unpredictability.

And it’s also a signal that unused footage sitting on your hard drive might have value you haven’t considered.

Not as content for views or sponsorships, but as possibly valuable data for machines learning to understand our world.

Questions to ask yourself:

* How much unused footage do you have archived?

* What categories does it fall into—nature, urban environments, specialized activities?

* Do you own all rights, or are there B-roll clips, music, or people who’d need to sign off?

The Current Market Reality—What We Know

Let’s separate signal from speculation.

Troveo, a video licensing platform connecting creators with AI companies, claims $20M in total revenue with $5M paid to creators.

I use $1-4 per minute as a range for this episode. My reasoning is Troveo is on the lower end of video AI licensing usually $1-3 a minute.

It’s likely larger companies like Protégé are also getting paid. We don’t know how much. My assumption is the amount is higher, likely much higher.

So I add $1 on the low end of pricing. And urge you all to look at going beyond $4 a minute, a tough and still more sound business than the wholesale $1-2 market. And it may just be what it is, a small market.

This is one of the few companies publishing numbers instead of hiding behind NDAs. That transparency matters.

Also means we’re looking at early-market indicators, not established rates.

Here’s what the pricing tiers appear to reflect:

$1-2/minute (Standard Footage):

* Talking heads

* Predictable motion

* Common scenarios

* Already-seen angles

$3-4/minute (Premium/Edge Cases):

* Rare weather phenomena

* Unusual wildlife behavior

* Technical processes under stress

* Unique temporal transitions

The Tesla framework helps understand this distinction—not because they’re licensing video, but because they’ve quantified what makes training data valuable.

* Highway driving footage is standard.

* A deer crossing during a snowstorm at night is premium.

* It’s not about monetary pricing; it’s about learning density.

Most Tesla footage comes from user cars, with operational costs built into the product, not per-minute purchases.

But their internal categorization reveals something useful: edge cases, rarities, and uniqueness teach AI systems more than repetitive standard scenarios.

The break-even reality check:

Look at the view of the market, knowing most of the business now is $1-2 per minute.

The threshold where this becomes a legitimate side revenue stream

This is why the $4/min barrier matters.

Below that, you’re liquidating existing assets at thin margins. Above it, potentially building a sustainable side business.

This is a one-time payment market.

You’re not building recurring revenue. You’re selling training data that will likely be used to eventually replace the need for more training data.

And for anything above $3 a minute, 4K is the rule. Other footage likely goes into the $1-2 pile, why you see garage sales of old content, some valuable and most not.

Action steps for this section:

* Calculate your actual production costs per minute for different types of footage

* Audit your archive—how many minutes of different quality levels do you have?

* Tag footage by category: nature, urban, people-heavy (complications), specialized technical

* For each category, honestly assess: standard or edge case?

* Permissions: who was in front of the camera, who was behind, and who was the producer? Signing off slows down AI licensing. Make sure your video is clear and clean with ownership and permission.

What Makes Video Actually Valuable

AI systems extract something from video that text and images can’t provide: motion, causality, temporal relationships, and context.

Would this video pass the AI Licensing test?

Mira Murati, founder of Thinking Machines Lab, says:

“We’re building multimodal AI that works with how you naturally interact with the world—through conversation, through sight, through the messy way we collaborate.”

That messiness, the unscripted, unedited reality contains teaching moments machines can’t get elsewhere.

* Compositional rarity matters: unusual angles, unexpected framing, perspectives humans naturally avoid. We shoot at eye level. We center subjects. AI needs overlooked angles.

* Temporal uniqueness creates value: time-lapses showing weather transitions, seasonal changes, processes that unfold over hours compressed into minutes. The dimension of time is where video is separated from images.

* Technical mastery in specialized domains: industrial processes, scientific phenomena, professional techniques that rarely get documented at high quality.

Video content may work, but here’s where most creators will hit the wall: rights and metadata.

Look at the metadata requirements. You need:

* Title, subtitle, creator names, release date

* Studio/independent status

* Creative rights documentation (who owns what)

* Talent and production rights (every person visible)

* Rights territory and existing licenses

* Work-for-hire status

* Genre/category classification

* Exact video minutes/hours

* Language

* Content description and summary

* Keywords and tags

* Views/distribution history

* Distribution channels used

* Viewer reviews/ratings if applicable

* Awards and recognition

* Media coverage

This isn’t “throw files in a zip folder and get paid.” This is treating your footage like a professional asset.

The legal complexity escalates with people. Every identifiable face needs a signed release. Every location might need permission. Every piece of music requires clearance.

This is why nature footage, weather phenomena, and process documentation are the cleanest paths. No talent releases. No location complications. Just you, a camera, and something worth documenting.

The Facts: Many avoid, a few automate with AI

Most creators won’t do this work. The administrative overhead eliminates casual participants. That means less competition for those who take it seriously.

Practical experiment (inspired by Tesla’s approach):

Take 10 minutes of your archived footage. Watch it with fresh eyes and categorize every 60-second segment:

* Standard: Could this be filmed by thousands of other creators? Common angle, predictable motion, everyday scenario?

* Premium: Is there something unusual here? An unexpected perspective, rare moment, technical complexity, or temporal uniqueness?

Be brutally honest. Most footage is standard. Still it has value. But understanding the ratio helps you know whether you’re sitting on $1/min inventory or $4/min.

Action steps:

* Conduct the standard vs. premium analysis on a sample of your footage

* 4K is the cut off line to $3-4 a minute, and that’s not a guarantee. Lesser quality probably means low end pricing.

* Make a list of locations, subjects, or processes you could access that others can’t

* Research what’s already available. If 10,000 creators have time-lapses of the Golden Gate Bridge, yours isn’t premium

* Identify your unique angle: local access, special...

Breaking the $4/Min Barrier: How AI Pays $120 for Raw Video and $30 for another?