Google had wowed early adopters with Veo3, its latest AI video generator, which produced realistic videos with sounds that were a cut above anything else that any AI company had managed so far, but it’s also come up with a novel way to show off its progress.
Google has launched something called Flow TV, which mimics the TV watching experience but with an important caveat — all the content is AI generated. Flow TV plays non-stop AI generated clips, and is available to all Google users while Veo3 is being rolled out. Veo3 is currently available only in 71 countries, and India isn’t on the list.
Like a real television, Flow TV has different channels. These channels are across different themes, such as “Passengers”, “Drone Zone”, “Time to reflect”, and our favourite, “Zoo break”. These channels feature short AI-generated clips on these themes. So the Drone Zone channel has stunning drone shots, while Zoo Break has AI-generated clips of animals in interesting situations, such as a tiger playing football or a bison having breakfast. These clips autoplay one after the other, and also scroll through different channels. Interestingly, Google also gives users the option to check out the prompt which was used to create these clips on Veo3. It’s possible to spend hours just watching the clips go by, and silently marvel at what AI is now capable of.
But Flow TV seems to deeper purpose that just helping people while away time watching AI-generated clips — it’s an exceedingly clever way for Google to show off its video generation capabilities to the masses. Google has come up with some pretty advanced AI models in recent months, but hasn’t quite been able to market them like OpenAI, which has managed some viral moments like the Ghibli trend, which saw its products even reach people who never shown any interest in AI until that point. Google now isn’t just producing powerful models, but seems to be putting in serious thought into how to market them as well through ideas like Flow TV. And if Google can up its marketing game, while continuing to innovate on models, it could be solidly poised to be a big winner from the ongoing AI revolution.