Hi everyone —
Eddie AI will be at IBC next week!! And we have a big update for you.
IBC:
Where: Booth 7.A38, Hall 7, Sept 11-14, 2026
Talk: Shamir Allibhai on the Future Tech Stage — Saturday, September 12, 14:15
Meet: one-on-one meeting booking
Drink: 6-8pm, Sunday, Sept 13 | RSVP
Full details: https://www.heyeddie.ai/blog/eddie-ai-at-ibc-2026
—Shamir
CEO & Co-founder, Eddie AI
Also this week:
Phil Tippett’s Stars Wars and Jurassic park inventory gets emptied out. GoPro is becoming a defence company. Google waves hundreds of millions at studios for the right to train on their IP. And AMC got tired of waiting for movies, so decided to distribute them..themselves.
Render Reel
AMC is becoming a distributor. The world’s biggest cinema chain just launched Leawood Films and will acquire theatrical rights to completed movies on a distribution-only basis. The Taylor Swift Eras Tour films stands as the POC which AMC pushed through its own network to $261.6 million worldwide.
Sundance and TikTok open Global Micro-Series Challenge. Five winners get $5K each and a Sundance Collab course package. The money isn’t meaningless but Sundance now putting its name on verticals is the real draw. Deadline September 10.
Google offers Hollywood hundreds of millions for AI rights. The company is in talks with all the big boys (Disney, Universal, Warner Bros etc) about licensing IP, although talent rights and studio caution have stalled any deals.
GoPro improves optics
Mere days after Markiplier emerged as its largest shareholder, GoPro agreed to merge with Starman Optical in a deal that gives existing shareholders $285 million in cash, leaves them with roughly 10% of the combined company and clears $92 million of debt.
Closing is targeted for year-end.
The interesting part is what Starman appears to be buying beyond the HERO.
GoPro has spent two decades building more than 2,500 US patents around small sensors and optics designed to survive abuse. Those capabilities now sit squarely inside markets that are expanding far beyond action cameras.
That makes this feel less like an exit from cameras than a reclassification of what GoPro actually is. The HERO can remain the consumer-facing brand while the deeper tech stack gets sold into much less visible applications.
GoPro starts to look like watch companies whose real business is the movement inside the case.
There’s also something slightly bleak about that shift.
The action camera was arguably one of the most democratic imaging devices ever made, cheap enough to be everywhere and tough enough to go almost anywhere.
Its next chapter may still involve cameras, but increasingly for customers and use cases the public will never see.
Phil Tippett’s 40 year-old Berkeley workshop gets raided. The studio behind creatures from Star Wars and Jurassic Park is sadly shutting up shop, with decades of models and production material being auctioned off. Possible reasons include consolidation and the broader migration away from physical effects work.
StudioCanal has turned archive into a label. They claim they’ve got the largest film library outside the U.S., spanning more than 18K titles, with 1,000 films restored in 4K. Terminator 2 is coming back in practically every format available.
Apple streams live baseball in Immersive Video. Select Friday Night Baseball games are being broadcast to Vision Pro in 8K 3D with a 180-degree field of view and Spatial Audio. The tech may be impressive, but the early reviews aren’t convinced. The Verge called the debut “visually pretty remarkable” but questioned why anyone would want to watch a three-hour baseball game with a heavy headset strapped to their face.
CODEX sells CFexpress cards now. They’re best known for proprietary media on high-end cinema cameras but just launched Type A and Type B cards alongside a USB4 reader, with sustained writes up to 3,000MB/s and Type B pricing from $538. It also arrives in the middle of the ongoing storage crisis through 2026.
Blackmagic turns iPad into wireless director’s monitor. Video Assist 2.3 adds NDI over Wi-Fi, remote record triggering and vertical monitoring without a transmitter or capture card, with the Pro tier at $199.99 a year. Another specialist box just became an app.
This week we’re watching:
Studio Heartbreak’s 15-minute animated short lands online three years after raising more than $400K on Kickstarter and making the festival rounds, including HollyShorts.
A very 2020s short-film release arc, with the audience arriving first and the free public release coming last.
Retail Therapy: The toothbrush that snitches
My dentist has been asking me about flossing for years. “Yeah, yeah”
Dyson’s new CameraJet makes that lie harder to maintain. A tiny camera under the brush head scans 28 images a second for gaps between your teeth, then fires a targeted jet of mouthrinse within 100 milliseconds.
Dyson says 9 in 10 people do not floss as much as they should so a lot of you will be getting caught out with this.
The app is where things get really invasive. You get live camera footage, coverage maps and feedback on the areas you keep missing. Dyson says no images are recorded or stored, either on the toothbrush or in the cloud.
Hmm..
$499.99 at Dyson.