Programmable video by Synthesia: a paradigm shift in media creation
Today, one of the world’s largest fast-food chains uses Synthesia to communicate to and train its global employee base. This entails everything from Covid-19 guidelines to guidance on entering oil in a deep fryer. Quick, inexpensive, multi-lingual training videos at fractional costs… and this is just one of the countless exciting use cases!
Since we backed Synthesia at seed in 2019, we’ve been very bullish on synthetic video — it’s a developing trend in computer vision and machine learning that has advanced the state-of-the-art in image and video generation to unprecedented levels of accuracy and realism. The company recently raised a $50m funding led by Kleiner Perkins and GV, the largest funding round in synthetic media. At MMC, we have continued to double-down on the company through the journey and want to share why we are so excited about them and the category they are building.
Synthetic media: an efficient medium of communication
‘Synthetic media’ is an emerging category used to describe text, image, voice or video that has been partially or completely generated by computers. Cited in our “State of AI report” in 2017, the use of new deep learning techniques to create audiovisual content is one of the most exciting technological developments in recent times.
Video is the most effective channel for communication. On average, you retain 95% of what you watch in a video compared to only 10% of what you read. The video industry and its consumption are snowballing, with 82% of consumer internet traffic expected to be via video in 2021. However, whether it be producing an advertisement or even a movie, video production at scale is still costly, complex and unscalable.
Therefore, the ability to use AI to generate photorealistic videos at scale in seconds would flip the equation for entire industries — and Synthesia is leading the charge on this!
Transforming the economics of media creation: text to video
Synthesia’s SaaS platform lets you create talking head style videos, by selecting an avatar, either an off-the-shelf actor or an avatar of yourself, which requires short mobile video footage done at home. You input the speech, and in a matter of minutes you have a piece of video, which is like any other video, but you created it without any cameras, actors, studios or lighting setups; at a fraction of the cost.
Core to the Synthesia proposition, its product is designed so that anyone can pick it up and use it immediately, which is what makes it so exciting. When you put video creation in the hands of everyone, video and audio can, and will, become the default expectation for consumers. Once you are ready to create many videos, you can begin to consume Synthesia’s API, which allows you to simultaneously create hundreds of personalised videos with just a few lines of code. What’s more, Synthesia was built from the ground up to be a global platform, and this means you can take a piece of video content and convert it into over 50 languages!
Usage is exploding but just scratching the surface on use cases
In 2021 alone, Synthesia’s customers have generated over 6 million videos using the platform. Customers span from individual consumers to hundreds of multinational enterprises, and use cases include learning & development, corporate/customer communications, sales prospecting, and many others.
As previously mentioned, one of the world’s largest fast-food chains uses it to communicate and train its global and multi-lingual employee base. This includes everything from new business policies to how to construct a signature dish. Quick, inexpensive training videos is game-changing for the production and efficacy of staff training content. At MMC, we use Synthesia to send engaging, personalised video messages to many of our entrepreneurs, investors, and friends, communications that would otherwise be via text on email.
When you put creative expression in the user’s hands, the use cases are boundless.
Shaping the synthetic future
Over the next decade, the technology will mature to a point where an entire video scene (or dare I say Hollywood-grade movie🧐) can be generated using a computer! Yes — there will be a world in which film-makers face increasing competition as a new generation of remote video programmers and other creative disciplines emerge.
Beyond creating the content, an economy will emerge around the IP ownership and permissions of synthetic avatars. This could span from royalty models for celebrity messages to ways in which you can trade, sell or loan your digital avatar.
To many, with the excitement of these new technologies, there will also be reticence around its potential misuse. By and large, like with Photoshop, we believe the vast majority of the content generated will be positive. As the industry matures, an entire ecosystem will emerge around the verification and security of video content. In the meantime, it is down to thought-leaders like Synthesia (who outline their responsible-use here) to create awareness that synthetic content exists. Ultimately, there will be a point in the not too distant future whereby synthetic content dominates what you see online.
A team with research at its core
When we first invested in the business, the founding team was key. Matthias Niessner of TUM and Lourdes Agapito of UCL, Professors in Visual Computing and 3D Vision, respectively, have pioneered in the industry for over a decade and, together with Victor Riparbelli and Steffen Tjerrild had the vision, skills, and ambition to pioneer in this category. The team did not stop at the Founders, CTO, Jon Starck spent nearly a decade developing computer graphics and visual effects software used by leading artists, designers and creative professionals.
With the deep bench of world-leading researchers, they continue using and pioneering new foundational AI technologies to democratise synthetic creativity.
They have also done an exceptional job attracting talented leadership in engineering, product, growth, customer success and business development — and will continue investing in these areas as part of their next phase!
If you want to join this incredible team, they are hiring!
Are you an entrepreneur active in this space? Get in touch.
