Render Time: July 14 Edition
Seven days, six plot twists, one algorithm smack-down.
Hi everyone.
We’re experimenting with a new Substack covering the most interesting news in our field.
Welcome to the first edition of Render Time. It’s for the full-time video pros who blend hustle with high taste.
Each week, we’ll bring you the sharpest updates in creative video tech: new tools, the latest on the video platforms, and the occasional guilty pleasure. If you shoot, cut, ship, create, and dream bigger — this one’s for you.
Let me know what you think. And if you enjoy it, please send it to three friends.
—Shamir
Quick-cut newsreel
Instagram Goes SEO. Public professional accounts now surface in Google search. Your Reel can rank beside a recipe blog, Hello, free traffic. Read more
Hollywood Hits ‘Generate.’ Lionsgate execs preview battle scenes with 10,000 AI soldiers for pennies, thanks to Runway Gen-4 and Google Veo 3. Pre-viz just became a spreadsheet line item. Read more
Money moves
TikTok’s Price Tag. Rumoured U.S. spin-off could rope in Oracle, KKR, Blackstone, and Andreessen Horowitz, a sale that would mint a brand-new creator economy stock overnight. Read more
Moonvalley Tops $124 M. The “ethical data” video-AI shop added another $10 M, pushing total funding north of $124 M to scale its Marey model for filmmakers. Read more
YouTube’s Cash Keeps Flowing. Q1 ad revenue hit $8.93 B (up 10.3 %), while paid subs cruised past 270 M. Translation: the platform can afford to squash spam.Read more
YouTube to AI slop: “Get a real job.”
It feels like every platform just changed the rules on a whim so no you’re hallucinating. From YouTube nuking “AI-slop” to TikTok cloning itself for America, the timeline got rearranged real quick.
Starting July 15, any channel pumping out mass-produced, repetitive, or “inauthentic” videos faces demonetisation or exile from the Partner Program. So you can say sayonara to reaction comps, slideshow listicles and robo-voiced top-tens.
If your channel’s just reheated copy-pasta, YouTube’s about to leave your AdSense al dente. Cooked, no sauce.
YouTube swears it’s just clarifying long-standing rules, but creators should probably start planning ahead.
How to survive the purge
Inject human DNA. Show your face or at least your voice (your actual one, yes they’ll know if its not).
Transform aggressively. Add analysis, narrative, B-roll, creative edits or anything that screams originality.
Brand every frame. Watermarks, custom intros, recurring segments = I didn’t get AI to make this.
Use AI as assist, not autopilot. Let it brainstorm or rough-cut, but don’t ask it to create for you.
Audit your back-catalogue. Unlist or delete copy-paste uploads before the guys below do it for you.
Consider it a quality tax… or an excuse to raise your rates. Read more
Verdict: Long-overdue spam purge if you’re a creator; a five-alarm fire drill if your channel is 95 % AI stock footage and ChatGPT voice-overs. Get to work.
Copy-paste country: rumors of bizarro TikTok “M2,” a U.S-only app
ByteDance’s answer to the looming divest-or-ban hammer is rumored Project “M2” a hard code-fork of TikTok that keeps the familiar interface but ushers in new, U.S-only algorithm trained solely on American data.
Target launch: September 17, the same day Trump’s latest deadline hits.
If a sale happens, a JV roster featuring Oracle, Blackstone, KKR, and a16z is in the pitch deck, with ByteDance holding a minority stake.
Beijing still needs to sign off on shipping any version of TikTok’s secret sauce abroad. Historically that’s a big nope so expect eleventh-hour geopolitics. Read more
What a two-tiktok world could look like
Content Silos: U.S. trends won’t auto-bleed into global feeds. Viral videos could be “huge in Ohio” yet invisible in Oslo, and vice-versa.
Double Everything: Brands, record labels, and creators may need two accounts, two ad budgets, two rights deals and yes, two blue checks. Sigh.
CapCut, Too: ByteDance is mirroring CapCut for U.S. servers, so even your editing workflow might shift.
Possible Reset: Rumors say follower counts might not match 1:1. Imagine having to re-earn your clout from scratch.
Hot take: Great for lawyers and lobbyists, brutal for creators who trade in cross-border virality. Start planning duplicate content strategies or brush up on WeChat if Beijing pulls plug.
The $600 million income stream: Twitch hits turbo to lock down streamer iShowSpeed
Twitch just lobbed what may be the fattest creator cheque in history: an eye-watering $600 million for only two years of iShowSpeed exclusivity.
Neither Speed nor Twitch has confirmed, but the leak surfaced the same week the streamer kicked off a pan-Europe IRL tour, dual-casting on both YouTube and Twitch; a live A/B test to prove he can haul his 100-million-viewer circus anywhere.
If the deal closes, it resets the streaming salary cap overnight and forces YouTube, Kick and Netflix’s fledgling live unit to answer with their own mega-offers.
Speed racing against world’s fastest man Noah Lyles in MrBeast’s $100K race challenge.
Verdict: Big wallet flex that forces every rival platform into an arms-race they can’t ignore; whether the deal closes or not, Speed just leveled up his price tag.
Global playback : China’s $2.2 billion dub gets English dub
China is currently winning the box office race with the year’s first $2 billion movie. Ne Zha 2, the home-grown animated sequel. $80 million budget, and has already banked $1.8 billion in China alone and $2.2 billion worldwide which makes it the highest grossing film of the year and fifth-highest-grossing film of all time. Read more
And now A24 and CMC Pictures are rolling out an English-language dub on August 22 fronted by Michelle Yeoh, betting Western audiences will add a few more zeroes before Cameron’s next Avatar arrives.
Keep an eye on how much that Chinese cash translates overseas, every studio certainly will.
Because…why the heck not?
Hailuo AI’s free “Cat Dive” prompt lets anyone generate Olympic-grade feline high-divers complete with believable splash physics. A meme, a tech demo, and the week’s most delightful waste of GPU cycles. Read more
Shoot Your Next video on Space Rocks and Diamonds
Luxury mod-house Caviar just rolled out its Cosmic Cabubu collection: Samsung Z Flip 7 and Z Fold 7 handsets rebuilt in aviation-grade titanium, plated in 24-karat gold, inlaid with Muonionalusta meteorite fragments (yes, actual space debris), and dotted with 13 real diamonds.
“Cabubu on Venus” Z Flip 7 – $8,910, limited to 8 pieces.
“Cabubu on Mars” Z Fold 7 – $10,340 (up to $11 k for 1 TB), also just 8 units.
Both still keep Samsung’s 50 MP/200 MP Galaxy-AI cameras, so technically you could vlog in 4K. Because why not film TikToks on a phone that’s literally part meteorite? Read more