I wrote about what the great AI freakout means for Hollywood, the robots coming for sports, A24’s deal with Google DeepMind, AI-produced microdramas in China and Apple Music’s big AI test.
When Summer House was hit with the West Wilson–Amanda Batula cheating scandal, the story exploded on social media. Viewers were dissecting the allegations, comparing timelines, pulling clips from earlier episodes and arguing about what happened. By the time the actual episode arrived, the internet had already spent days doing its own version of post-production.
That is a fundamental mismatch. Bravo has the footage, the characters, the history. It has cameras rolling and hours of material that could illuminate what happens when things go poorly for our favorite unscripted characters. What it doesn’t have is the ability to turn all that material into new television quickly enough to participate in the conversation as it’s actually happening.
Blame the calendar. Television still programs unscripted shows around weekly episodes, with a finished cut that has to be locked long before any viewer sees it.
In other words, almost everything else that was shot never makes it to air.
Quickture is an AI-powered editing company founded by reality-TV veterans Irad Eyal and Matt Hanna around a provocative bet: The enormous amount of footage thrown away could become programming of its own. ITV and Paramount are already clients.
Eyal, Quickture’s CEO, is an executive producer of Southern Charm and creator/producer of Floor Is Lava; Hanna, the company’s chief strategy officer, has spent 25 years moving between network television and independent production, creating thousands of hours of programming for MTV, VH1, Bravo, Discovery and other networks and streamers. Between them, they have lived through the post-production bottleneck from both sides — deciding what gets made and then figuring out how to turn mountains of footage into finished television.
The opportunity is enormous. Roughly 99 percent of unscripted footage never makes it to air, leaving major franchises sitting on years — sometimes decades — of material viewers have never seen.
But Quickture’s real pitch isn’t that AI can help producers make the same episode faster. It’s that one reality-TV shoot could suddenly produce four, five or more pieces of programming — including shows built around whatever character, relationship or scandal viewers happen to be obsessing over that week.
And if that works, it changes something much bigger than post-production: It could materially change what a television show is actually worth and the library value of existing catalogs.
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Comments
“If AI can compress the cost of getting from thousands of hours of footage to a coherent story, the marginal cost of making another version will fall precipitously.” This is a big IF. I’m a reality TV show runner and it takes a lot of man-hours and a story producer and an editor time to craft a story. IF you can make a coherent story, sure. But AI’s don’t have a point of view. When putting together stories in the edit, you need a distinct POV that represents the show. You can’t teach an AI a point of view. Sure, you can find footage of people yelling at each other, but without context it’s just noise. And that’s not storytelling.
Totally agree– that’s why we built a new interface for crafting story right into Avid and Premiere. Our goal is to help AEs, story producers, editors build their story faster and better, not make the decisions for them.
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