Five Ways the Video Industry Can Survive — and Thrive — When the AI Bubble Bursts

A Five-Point Plan showcasing how the video industry can weather an AI market crash, from hybrid cloud strategies to human-AI collaboration and open standards.

The growing consensus is that it's no longer a case of if the AI bubble bursts, it's a case of when. Everyone from newspaper editorials to the Bank of England to OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman, himself say that AI stocks are over-valued and that a market correction is on the way.

In a pool interview in August Altman said he thinks it’s “insane” that some AI startups with “three people and an idea” are receiving funding at such high valuations. “That’s not rational behavior,” he said. “Someone’s gonna get burned there, I think.”

'Market correction' is, of course, a euphemism for a full-on stock market crash. And there are enough red warning flags including naked investor greed, energy and hardware bottlenecks, and a lack of real world benefits (it's estimated by MIT that up to 95% of generative AI pilots at companies are failing) to safely assume that it's going to be a big one when it comes and akin to the dot-com crash of 2000.

But, in the same way that the internet didn't disappear when the dot-com bubble burst, AI is not going anywhere either. So, what can the video industry do to make sure it gets to the other side of what is coming down the economic pipe and build from there? Here's our Five-Point Plan.

1. Audit Reliance Now

AI is not going back into the box; it's too useful. Companies such as Adobe have made it a powerful assist to the overall workflow. The level of automation it provides in editing, metadata generation, speech to text, and more will ensure that AI tools are used long after the hype cycle has returned to normal. 

Likewise there are some specialists out there, some even with AI in their names like Eddie AI, that we would think are useful enough that they will survive any downturn. And even Apple's what we may call kindly 'cautious' approach may turn out to be the right one despite the Wall St bulls urging it onwards.

If the way AI works for you is proven, if it actually fits into your workflow and delivers whatever benefits you're after from it, and as long as the company behind it is sound and not just trying to grow frantically to stay ahead of any potential creditors, then all is good. But now is definitely a time when due diligence in deploying AI-powered solutions is at a premium. 

2. Avoid Lock-Ins

When vendor churn accelerates, open standards are the key to making sure that what is left behind remains usable. Swerve anything that looks like it might involve hitching your wagon to one vendor or format, whether that be actual physical boxes of kit and equipment or virtualised services in the cloud. 'Open source', 'vendor neutral', 'industry standards', are all the sorts of key phrases you want to hear.

3. Hedge Bets with Hybrid

One of the consequences of any AIpocalypse will be what could be a dramatic reshaping of the cloud-based compute resources that the industry has come to rely on for rendering etc. In the short term, rapid consolidation in the market could lead to price rises. However, in the longer term the pressure on GPU resources might ease across the industry as some of the more speculative players disappear from the market.

 A hybrid infrastructure balancing cloud resources with local compute power is by far the most efficient way to ride out these perturbations. A solely cloud-native approach has risks involving maintaining cost-effective provision, while running a business resolutely on-prem would be an idiosyncratic thing to do in 2025. The hybrid cloud approach balances flexibility with risk and is liable to be the ideal default mode for years to come yet.

4. Remember People Skills

This is a creative industry. For all the wishing that AI will just climb back into its box, even a dot-com level crash isn't going to make that happen. But what it is likely to do is reset expectations and make people understand the truth that it is human and AI collaboration together that delivers the best results.

You need to work with skilled people to get the best out of all new technologies. Despite a lot of unsubstantiated hype pointing to the contrary, AI is no exception to that rule. 

5. Use the Bubble as a Filter

There is some hope that the comparative skepticism of the creative industries towards all things AI might limit the economic damage any bubble collapse will cause. In general, we're not all-in on the technology just yet, and this is a perfect opportunity to pull back a bit and see what works; what is worth saving and what can be consigned to the start-up bin of history. 

Think of the collapse as a Darwinian event. Afterwards we will have a much better idea regarding what tools are going to be sustainable in the long-term and who the trustworthy partners we all want to work with are. 

The Age of AI 2.0

The hype surrounding AI has been relentless. At RedShark we actually ignore a lot of stories about it that cross our desk because we're either wary of the technologies being used, the uses they are being put to, or the companies that are deploying them. And there are still huge issues involving ethics and copyright that need to be addressed moving forward. Look at the mess that became the recent launch of Open AI's Sora2 with its Nazi SpongeBobs and Criminal Pikachus.

But, as we've said and everyone points out, the genie isn't going back into the bottle anytime soon. AI is undoubtedly more than simply the "new pencil" to create with that Paramount Skydance CEO, David Ellison, likes to call it. But providing the bursting of the bubble doesn't bring down the rest of us with it, rebuilding AI 2.0 provides us with the unique opportunity to take things a bit slower and make sure that human creativity is always central to the way it is used in this industry and others.