Disney+ may start hosting user-generated AI videos (www.engadget.com)

Disney CEO Bob Iger said on the company’s earnings call that Disney+ is exploring partnerships to let users create and consume short-form AI-generated videos on the platform. He described “productive conversations” with unnamed AI partners but gave no timeline; the idea is to add more engaging, user-generated content while also protecting Disney’s IP. The announcement is notable because it represents a strategic pivot for a company that has recently pursued legal action against AI platforms (cease-and-desist to Character.AI; lawsuits against Midjourney and Hailuo) to defend character likenesses and copyrighted material. For the AI/ML community this signals new technical and commercial demands: platform integrations will likely require licensed model access, fine-tuning or constrained generation to preserve trademarked character appearance and voice, robust content moderation pipelines, provenance and watermarking to combat deepfakes, and copyright-aware generation controls. That will drive interest in controllable generative models, rights-conditioned embeddings, safety classifiers, and MLOps workflows for real-time moderation and monetization. It also raises legal and governance questions about derivative works, dataset curation, and acceptable-use policies—making Disney+ a potential testbed for how major IP holders balance creative platforms with stringent model-level guardrails.