Goodbye Sora, AI video becomes adult: now the challenge shifts to business and professional supply chains
OpenAI's step back marks the end of the era of technological 'curiosities'. From Fiverr to Adobe, a market of specialists is born: here are the costs and strategies of the new protagonists of generative production, between avatars, advanced editing and monetisation nodes.
The death of Sora, just announced by OpenAI, does not sadden us too much. It is actually a sign that the market is maturing: OpenAI is now aiming at AI services that it can monetise, increasingly business-like (agents, coding...), and is leaving the space of generative video to those who want to get serious about it, with a specialised approach. In short: making videos with AI stops being a curiosity for bored users and becomes, clearly, a branch of business. This is also demonstrated by the launch of the AI Video Hub, launched in March by Fiverr, a space dedicated to a select group of directors and creators specialised in videos made with AI, to whom brands can commission commercials, social content and brand films.
Around this business a chain of different trades is born. The first trade is the actual generative video: one starts with text, images or visual references and obtains a clip. Here the best known names today are Runway, Adobe Firefly, Kling and Pika (not including Sora, which disappears on 26 April, at least in the version we know). The second trade is the industrial production of spoken word videos, used for training, sales, onboarding, customer care, and language localisation. HeyGen and Synthesia dominate in this bracket, while Invideo occupies an intermediate position, closer to rapid production for marketing and social.
Runway remains one of the benchmarks for those who want an environment closer to editing and creative prototyping than just prompt generation. The official price list starts at $12 per month for Standard, rises to $28 for Pro and $76 for Unlimited with annual billing. The logic is credit-based. Used by agencies, creators and content teams that need to produce many variations and refine the video pipeline.
Adobe Firefly is aimed at those already living in the Creative Cloud ecosystem. Adobe presents Firefly as a platform for images, video, audio and vector graphics, and on the video side also combines text-to-speech, music generator and sound effects generator with clip generation. The Firefly Standard plan starts at EUR 11.26 per month.
Among the most advanced is Google Veo, one of the few to natively generate audio along with video. It is available in the Google AI plans, from EUR 7.99 per month, with a credit system.
