{"id":48153,"date":"2025-07-30T18:32:10","date_gmt":"2025-07-30T18:32:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/48153\/"},"modified":"2025-07-30T18:32:10","modified_gmt":"2025-07-30T18:32:10","slug":"netflix-of-ai-generates-playable-tv-shows","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/48153\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Netflix of AI’ Generates Playable TV Shows"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tEdward Saatchi<\/a> isn\u2019t totally sure people will flock to Showrunner<\/a>, the new AI-generated TV show service his company is launching publicly this week. But he has a vote of confidence from Amazon<\/a>, which has invested in Fable<\/a>, Saatchi\u2019s San Francisco-based start-up.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe amount of Amazon\u2019s funding in Fable isn\u2019t being disclosed. The money is going toward building out Showrunner, which Fable has hyped as the \u201cNetflix of AI\u201d: a service that lets you type in a few words to create scenes \u2014 or entire episodes \u2014 of a TV show, either from scratch or based on an existing story-world someone else has created.<\/p>\n

\n\tFable is launching Showrunner to let users tinker with the animation-focused generative-AI system, following several months in a closed alpha test with 10,000 users. Initially, Showrunner will be free to use but eventually the company plans to charge creators $10-$20 per month for credits allowing them to create hundreds of TV scenes, Saatchi said. Viewing Showrunner-generated content will be free, and anyone can share the AI video on YouTube or other third-party platforms.<\/p>\n

\n\tSaatchi\u2019s hypothesis is that AI \u2014 instead of simply being a tool for cheaper special effects \u2014 represents a new entertainment medium, one that more closely resembles video games.<\/p>\n

\n\tUsing AI purely as a VFX tool is \u201ca little sad,\u201d said Saatchi, Fable\u2019s CEO and co-founder. \u201cThe \u2018Toy Story of AI\u2019 isn\u2019t just going to be a cheap \u2018Toy Story.\u2019 Our idea is that \u2018Toy Story of AI\u2019 would be playable, with millions of new scenes, all owned by Disney.\u201d Saatchi said Fable is in talks about a partnership with Disney, among other Hollywood studios, about licensing IP for the Showrunner platform.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cHollywood streaming services are about to become two-way entertainment: audiences watching a season of a show [and] loving it will now be able to make new episodes with a few words and become characters with a photo,\u201d Saatchi said. \u201cOur relationship to entertainment will be totally different in the next five years.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThat said, Saatchi expressed some doubt about whether people really want to be their own showrunners. \u201cMaybe nobody wants this and it won\u2019t work,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\n\tSaatchi previously co-founded Oculus Story Studios, formed in 2014 as a division of Oculus VR, the virtual-reality company acquired by Meta (then Facebook) for $2 billion<\/a>. Oculus Story Studio produced several VR titles, including the Emmy-winning \u201cHenry.\u201d<\/a> But as a category, VR entertainment didn\u2019t materialize \u2014 and Meta shut down Story Studio in 2017<\/a>. <\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIn 2014, we said, \u2018Everything will take off when this happens,’\u201d Saatchi said, like when sales of VR headsets passed a certain milestone. \u201cAnd it didn\u2019t work.\u201d In 2019, Saatchi led the formation of Fable Studio<\/a>, which pivoted away from VR to the current model of AI-fueled playable stories. (A separate company called Fable is a cybersecurity start-up<\/a> focused on AI-generated security training.)<\/p>\n

\n\tFable\u2019s Showrunner public launch features two original \u201cshows\u201d \u2014 story worlds with characters users can steer into various narrative arcs. The first is \u201cExit Valley,\u201d described as \u201ca \u2018Family Guy\u2019-style TV comedy set in \u2018Sim Francisco\u2019 satirizing the AI tech leaders Sam Altman, Elon Musk, et al.\u201d The other is \u201cEverything Is Fine,\u201d in which a husband and wife, going to Ikea, have a huge fight \u2014 whereupon they\u2019re transported to a world where they\u2019re separated and have to find each other.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe Showrunner system lets users insert themselves into a TV show\u2019s world, too, which has proven to be a popular use-case among the alpha testers, Saatchi said. \u201cPeople are interested in putting themselves and their friends into these stories. That was a surprise,\u201d he said. \u201cWe didn\u2019t design it with that in mind. People want to be in fictional worlds and also want to tell stories about themselves.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tShowrunner is powered by Fable\u2019s proprietary AI model, SHOW-2. Last year, the company published a research paper on how it built the SHOW-1 model. As part of that, it released nine AI-generated episodes based on \u201cSouth Park.\u201d The episodes, made without the permission of the \u201cSouth Park\u201d creators, received more than 80 million views. (Saatchi said he was in touch with the \u201cSouth Park\u201d team, who were reassured the IP wasn\u2019t being deployed commercially.)<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tA still from Fable\u2019s \u201cSouth Park\u201d AI research project<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt has been incredibly exciting to see how Showrunner ignites creativity in people,\u201d said Jacob Madden, Fable\u2019s head of technology and co-creator of Showrunner. \u201cThe platform allows showrunners to experiment with their stories in real-time, constantly iterating and refining their vision. Showrunner redefines what a TV show can be and I cannot wait to see what stories emerge next.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tWhile Saatchi is bullish on the technology, he conceded that a major weakness of Showrunner and AI in general for entertainment is that it\u2019s more suited to episodic content rather than, say, an epic 60-episode arc a la \u201cBreaking Bad\u201d or \u201cGame of Thrones.\u201d <\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cToday AI can\u2019t sustain a story beyond one episode,\u201d Saatchi said. \u201cWhat AI is strongest at is deeply episodic shows with characters largely resetting every episode \u2014 sitcoms, police procedurals, space exploration.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAccording to Saatchi, Fable\u2019s AI model includes \u201cguardrails\u201d to block offensive or illegal behavior, including protections against copyright infringement. (Last month, Disney and NBCUniversal were the first major Hollywood studios to file an AI-related copyright lawsuit<\/a>, against start-up Midjourney.) In addition to those protections, Saatchi said Showrunner has \u201cguardrails around the story\u201d: For example, the system can evaluate whether a specific character would \u201creally be doing this.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tOut of the gate, Showrunner is focused on animated content because it requires much less processing power than realistic-looking live-action video scenes. Saatchi said Fable wants to stay out of the \u201cknife fight\u201d among big AI companies like OpenAI, Google and Meta that are racing to create photorealistic content. \u201cIf you\u2019re competing with Google, are you going to win?\u201d Saatchi said. \u201cOur goal is to have the most creative models,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\n\tFable, which has 15 employees, is based in San Francisco\u2019s Mission District. Previous investors in the company include Day One Ventures,\u00a08VC and\u00a0Greycroft. More info is available on the company\u2019s website at showrunner.xyz<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Edward Saatchi isn\u2019t totally sure people will flock to Showrunner, the new AI-generated TV show service his company…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":48154,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[182,960,181,507,37557,34475,37558,74],"class_list":{"0":"post-48153","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-amazon","10":"tag-artificial-intelligence","11":"tag-artificialintelligence","12":"tag-edward-saatchi","13":"tag-fable","14":"tag-showrunner","15":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48153","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48153"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48153\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/48154"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48153"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48153"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48153"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}