Latest news with #Hollywood-level
CNBC
07-05-2025
- Business
- CNBC
CEO at 33, Tubi's Anjali Sud on success hacks she learned at Amazon, IAC on way to top of Fox streaming
During her childhood, Anjali Sud's father would put clips from Wall Street Journal articles about chief executive officers on her pillow for her to find when she went to sleep. The move might have been a bit presumptuous, Sud says, but the message that her father, an entrepreneur himself, was sending stayed with her: "I grew up with parents who believed I could be the person in that clip," she now says. Sud rose to the role of CEO at video streaming platform Vimeo, part of Barry Diller's media conglomerate IAC, at the age of 33, and took the company public in 2021. Now, she is the CEO of Fox Corp. 's free ad-supported streaming app Tubi, where she has overseen rapid growth. In her first full year as CEO (2024), monthly active users hit 80 million; it's now nearing 100 million. In February, it hosted the biggest streaming event of all, the Super Bowl. Sud's time at Vimeo was focused on helping creators get their stories out and that continues to inform her view of where streaming content and viewership is headed. "I really believe the future of entertainment is going to be free for consumers," Sud, who was named to the 2025 Changemakers list, tells CNBC. "The future of the internet is a lot more diversity in storytelling and audience tastes than reflected in the traditional Hollywood system today," she said. Below are highlights from an extended video interview that CNBC's Julia Boorstin conducted with Sud, in which the CEO weighed in on becoming a chief executive at 33, the competition across the disrupted media landscape, and her approach to getting things done as her responsibilities have grown and the stakes have gotten bigger. And her biggest life hack of all: getting enough sleep. Anjali Sud, CEO of Fox streaming app Tubi, at the 75th Primetime Emmy Awards held at the Peacock Theater on January 15, 2024 in Los Angeles, California. If you are trying to compete with Netflix or YouTube directly, you may be setting yourself up for failure. That was Sud's view when she was leading Vimeo and attempting to position it for success in the media marketplace. "You have to know your strengths and believe you are embarking on a strategy where you have the right to win," she said. For Vimeo, the need to provide more space to more creators, and creators' need for more tools, drove the business. "I remember trying to convince people before the pandemic that companies would livestream town halls, and I would be told no over and over again," she recalled. "It's really important to not let the competition drive your strategy," she said. While she says YouTube has, to date, probably taken the idea of enabling creators outside of the traditional Hollywood system the farthest, she doesn't think any company has fully succeeded in building the business model of taking content from a diverse slate of creators that does really well on social and enabling those creators to produce Hollywood-level content. And what Tubi is hearing from audiences is that they want to see this talent on bigger screens. What is fundamental to developing the conviction for success is listening to and understanding customers — their needs and the problems they are trying to solve. "Every strategy that wins in business has some element of that," she said. This doesn't mean you can ignore the competition. "Your competition is your mirror," she said. "It helps you assess where to lean into strength, or where to differentiate ... what you are not going to do. ... But don't do things because others are doing them. That's never a good reason," she added. How Amazon gets product out to market before it's even built Sud was at Amazon back when e-commerce could be described as still in scaling mode as opposed to dominant mode. It's well known that Amazon hammers home the concept of customers coming first, and Sud said the company built many management principles around this core belief. One small practice related to this which Sud has taken with her is Amazon's approach to launching a new product. The company starts with a practice that seems counter-intuitive: it writes a press release explaining the new product to the customer before the product exists. And then it "works backwards" from that moment, she said. Amazon is also well known for a corporate culture that prioritizes internal debate, and Sud says that encouraging dissenting views and opinions in the pursuit of getting to the right answer is another key to innovation. In any area where the goal is innovation, there is "no playbook, no obvious answer," she says. As a result, if the internal culture isn't "really fighting it out a little bit to get to at a right answer, then your track record won't be as strong," she said. "Build the culture where people see you won't get punished for speaking your mind," she says. Being 'impatient' always worked at Barry Diller's IAC While at IAC and on the way up to Vimeo CEO, she says the corporate management experience was somewhat like being thrown into the deep end of the pool as a method of learning to swim — in the most positive sense of that analogy, she quickly added. IAC acted on a core belief that if you bet on talent over experience and give people opportunities but also "leave it to them to figure it out," then success will follow for individuals and their organizations. That deep-end of the pool analogy was also enacted in another way at IAC: through a philosophy of being "impatient on execution and patient on vision," says Sud. She learned both are possible at the same time. Leaders need a sense of urgency, to be constantly striving forward day-to-day on how to execute, but when it comes to vision never forget that great businesses are built over a long time. "You can't give up when something doesn't go well. You can't hedge when it comes to the actual vision," she said. Imposter syndrome is an 'every day' reality for CEOs Leaders are often asked what they wish they had known earlier in their paths to success. For Sud, accepting that "imposter syndrome" will always be a part of the experience would have saved some time and effort. "I spent so much time when I was younger; so much energy was wasted trying to show up as a certain kind of leader or trying to contort myself to be what I thought everyone would want me to be, and I wish I had just taken all that energy and just focused it on my job and myself," she said. In fact, she said that did not happen until she became a CEO, and "had the privilege to be myself." She also thinks it's not only important for the individual but is contagious for the organization. "People don't want to follow and don't rally behind leaders who aren't authentic," she said. But the "imposter" feeling never goes away. "I feel it every day, right now," she said. "I have always felt it and reframed it. ... Nobody's got it figured out. Nobody," she said. Make the tradeoffs needed to get enough sleep As a working mother, Sud says managing life and work is a constant struggle — and she concedes that she has a lot more help than many working moms — but she adds that there is "no better capital allocator, no one better equipped to manage scare resources," than a working mom. "My bar for what is worth doing in every aspect of life gets higher and higher," she said. One big part of life that Sud says contributes to all of her success is eight to nine hours of sleep every night. "My big life hack is sleep," she said. "I have been doing it [8-9 hours per night] for a decade, and including through having kids and a career, and many people will say how on earth do you do that?" In addition to the help Sud gets at home, she also makes some big daily sacrifices. "If I have to choose between working out or watching a show, I choose sleep. I take the tradeoffs. ... I choose sleep every single time and definitely took a hit to my social life," she said. Having been a female CEO at a young age, Sud is intent on recreating the environment in which she was able to grow. "It made me want to reach out and have people on my team given that opportunity," she said, and she added there are examples of women on her team that have become two-time CEOs on their own now. "It does cascade. When you are young and ambitious, pay attention to the people above you and their journeys and try to put yourself in the position of working at a company that has that philosophy. It will make things so much easier," she said. Watch the video above to learn more about Sud's life and career and how she thinks about leadership and reaching successful outcomes.
Epoch Times
02-05-2025
- Politics
- Epoch Times
CIA Launches Videos to Persuade Chinese Officials to Work for Them
As rumors of power struggles within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) The two videos, each under three minutes long and shot with Hollywood-level production value, feature a narrator speaking in Mandarin. The voiceovers portray a person wanting to take control of his future and include a message that seeks to persuade officials to contact the CIA and work for the U.S. agency. 'One of the primary roles of the CIA is to collect intelligence for the president and for our policymakers,' CIA Director John Ratcliffe The videos are available on the agency's various social media channels, including YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Telegram, and X. The first The narrator tells the story of an accomplished official ill at ease in his position due to gossip, backstabbing, and colleagues simply 'disappearing.' Related Stories 4/28/2025 10/3/2024 'This man has worked hard his whole life to climb to a high position, but now realizes that no matter how high his position is, it is not enough to protect his family in these terrifying and turbulent times. He longs to take control of his fate, to find a path that will protect his loved ones and the fruits of his lifelong hard work,' the description continues. The video links to a page with instructions on how to contact the CIA through a Tor service—a secure, anonymous, encrypted digital channel. Below the Mandarin, there is a brief English description that says, 'Our global mission demands that individuals be able to reach out to CIA securely from anywhere.' The second 'This video shows a Chinese official who studied and worked hard his whole life, but his hard work only nourished the career of his superior,' the description reads. 'Trapped in a system that was difficult to climb out of and consumed by intense competition, he is looking for another way to reward his hard work and achieve his goals. He chooses to make the difficult and important decision to contact the CIA in a safe way.' The second video ends by telling the viewer, 'Your fate is in your control.' The descriptions of both videos ask their target audience whether they have information to share about the CCP's 'economic, fiscal, or trade policies.' 'Do you work in the defense industry? Do you work in national security, diplomacy, science, advanced technology, or deal with people who work in these fields? Please contact us,' the descriptions read. The videos seek to play into the treacherous political environment under the CCP, which has had a persistent history of fierce and at times deadly When Xi Jinping became Party head in 2013, a pervasive anti-corruption campaign followed that largely targeted his political rivals. However, in recent years, some of these disciplinary methods have been used against Xi's own Recently, China's People's Liberation Army also came under scrutiny for corruption, with several top officers From
Yahoo
19-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
SkyReels Open Sources the World's First Human-Centric Video Foundation Model for AI Short Drama Creation – SkyReels-V1, Reshaping the AI Short Drama Landscape
Singapore, Feb. 19, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- On February 18, SkyReels open-sourced the world's first human-centric video foundation model for AI short drama creation, SkyReels-V1, and the world's first SOTA-level expressive portrait image animation based on video diffusion transformers, SkyReels-A1. Open-Source Repositories: SkyReels-V1https:// SkyReels-A1https:// Technical Report: Official Website: Addressing global pain points in AI video generation—such as closed-source models, limited accessibility, high costs, and usability issues—SkyReels is breaking new ground by open-sourcing two SOTA-level models and algorithms, SkyReels-V1 and SkyReels-A1. These cutting-edge technologies for AI short drama creation are now offered to the open-source community and AIGC users. The production format for AI videos and short dramas has been market-validated. SkyReels helps address the challenges in traditional short drama production—such as complex offline processes including scriptwriting, casting, set design, storyboard creation, filming, and post-production, which require substantial manpower, incur high costs, and extend production cycles. 01SkyReels-V1: Human-Centric Video Foundation Model, the world's first open-source video generation model dedicated to AI short drama creation AI short dramas require precise control over both cognitive and physical expressions—integrating lip-sync, facial expression, and body movement generation into a unified process. Currently, lip-sync generation is particularly well-developed, owing to its strong mapping with audio cues that enable high precision and superior user experience. Yet, the true quality of AI short drama generation lies in the nuances of character performance. To dramatically enhance the controllability of facial expressions and body movements, SkyReels-V1 not only meticulously annotates performance details but also processes emotions, scene context, and acting intent, fine-tuning on tens of millions of high-quality, Hollywood-level data points. Research team has implemented advanced technical upgrades to capture micro-expressions, performance subtleties, scene descriptions, lighting, and composition. As a result, characters generated by SkyReels now exhibit remarkably precise acting details—approaching an award-winning level. SkyReels-V1 delivers cinematic-grade micro-expression performance, supporting 33 nuanced facial expressions and over 400 natural motion combinations that faithfully reproduce genuine human emotional expression. As demonstrated in the accompanying video, SkyReels-V1 can generate expressions ranging from hearty laughter, fierce roars, and astonishment to tears—showcasing rich, dynamic performance details. Moreover, SkyReels-V1 brings cinematic-level lighting and aesthetics to AI video generation. Trained on Hollywood-level high-quality film data, every frame generated by SkyReels exhibits cinematic quality in composition, actor positioning, and camera angles. Whether capturing solo performance details or multi-character scenes, the model now achieves precise expression control and high-quality visuals. Importantly, SkyReels-V1 supports both text-to-video and image-to-video generation. It is the largest open-source video generation model supporting image-to-video tasks at equivalent resolution, achieving SOTA-level performance across multiple metrics. Figure 1: Comparison of Text-to-Video Metrics for SkyReels-V1 (Source: SkyReels) Such SOTA-level performance is made possible not only by SkyReels self-developed high-quality data cleaning and manual annotation pipeline—which has built a tens-of-millions–scale dataset from movies, TV shows, and documentaries—but also by 'Human-Centric' multimodal video understanding model, which significantly enhances the ability to interpret human-related elements in video, particularly through in-house character intelligence analysis system. In summary, thanks to the robust data foundation and advanced character intelligence analysis system, SkyReels-V1 can achieve: Cinematic Expression Recognition: 11 types of facial expression understanding for characters in film and drama, including expressions such as disdain, impatience, helplessness, and disgust, with emotional intensity levels categorized into strong, medium, and weak. Character Spatial Awareness: Leveraging 3D reconstruction technology to comprehend spatial relationships among multiple characters, enabling cinematic positioning. Behavioral Intent Understanding: Constructing over 400 behavioral semantic units for precise action interpretation. Scene-Performance Correlation: Analyzing the interplay between characters, wardrobe, setting, and plot. is not only among the very few open-source video foundation models worldwide, but it is also the most powerful in terms of performance for character-driven video generation. With SkyReels self-developed inference optimization framework 'SkyReels-Infer,' the inference efficiency has been significantly improved —achieving 544p video generation on a single RTX 4090 in just 80 seconds. The framework supports distributed multi-GPU parallelism, Context Parallel, CFG Parallel, and VAE Parallel. Furthermore, by implementing FP8 quantization and parameter-level offload, it meets the requirements of low-memory GPUs; support for flash attention, SageAttention, and model compilation optimizations further reduces latency; and leveraging the open-source diffuser library enhances 2: Using equivalent RTX 4090 resources (4 GPUs), the SkyReels-Infer version reduces end-to-end latency by 58.3% compared to the HunyuanVideo official version (293.3s vs. 464.3s). Figure 3: Under similar A800 resource conditions, the SkyReels-Infer version reduces end-to-end latency by 14.7%–28.2% compared to the HunyuanVideo official version, demonstrating a more robust multi-GPU deployment strategy. 02SkyReels-A1: The First SOTA-Level Expressive Portrait Image Animation Algorithm Based on Video Diffusion Transformers To achieve even more precise and controllable character video generation, the SkyReels is open-sourcing SkyReels-A1, a SOTA-level algorithm based on video diffusion transformer for expression and action control. Comparable to Runway Act-One, SkyReels-A1 supports video-driven, film-grade expression capture, enabling high-fidelity micro-expression reproduction. SkyReels-A1 can generate highly realistic and consistency videos for characters in any reference conditions—from portrait of half-body to full-body shots. It achieves a precise simulation of facial expressions, emotional nuances, skin textures, and body movements. By inputting both a reference and a driving video, SkyReels-A1 'transplants' the facial expressions and actions details from the driving video onto the character in the reference image. The resulting video shows no distortion and faithfully reproduces the micro-expressions and body movements from the driving video, even surpassing the video quality generated by Runway Act-One in evaluation. More encouragingly, SkyReels-A1 not only supports profile-based expression control but also enables highly realistic eyebrow and eye micro-expression alignment, along with more pronounced head movements and natural body motions. For example, in the same dialogue scene, while the character generated by Runway Act-One shows noticeable distortion and deviates from the original appearance, SkyReels-A1 preserves the character's details, maintaining authentic nuance and seamlessly blending facial expressions as well as body movements. Furthermore, SkyReels-A1 can drive more dramatic facial expressions scenes. Compared to Runway Act-One that fails to generate the desired effect, SkyReels-A1 support to transfer more complex expression dynamics, enabling the character's facial emotions to naturally synchronize with body movements and scene content for an exceptionally life–like performance. 03Empowering the Global AI Short Drama Ecosystem through Open-Sourcing Video generation models are among the most challenging components of AI short drama creation. Although model generation capabilities have significantly improved over the past year, there remains a considerable gap—particularly given the high production costs. By open-sourcing our SOTA-level models, SkyReels-V1 and SkyReels-A1, SkyReels becomes the first in the AI short drama industry to take such a step. This initiative not only represents a modest yet significant contribution to the industry but also marks a major leap toward fostering a flourishing ecosystem for AI short drama creation and video generation. It's believed that with further advancements in inference optimization and the open-sourcing of controllable algorithms, these models will soon provide users with more cost-effective and highly controllable AIGC capabilities. SkyReels aims to empower users to create AI short dramas at minimal cost, overcome current issues of inconsistent video generation, and enable everyone to generate detailed, controllable character performances using their own computers. This open-sourcing of our video generation models is not only a technological breakthrough that helps narrow the digital divide in the global content industry, but it is also a revolution in cultural production capacity. In the future, the convergence of short dramas, gaming, virtual reality, and other fields will accelerate industrial integration. AI short dramas have the potential to evolve from a 'tech experiment' into a mainstream creative medium and become a new vehicle for global cultural expression. 'Achieve artificial general intelligence and empower everyone to better shape and express themselves.' With this open-source initiative, SkyReels will continue to release more video generation models, algorithms, and universal models—advancing AGI equity and fostering the sustained growth and prosperity of the AI short drama ecosystem, while benefiting the open-source community, developer ecosystems, and the broader AI industry. CONTACT: Jingnan Fu Skywork AI fujingnan(at) in to access your portfolio
