philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Moonvalley releases a video generator it claims was trained on licensed content

Los Angeles-based startup Moonvalley has launched an AI video-generating model it claims is one of the few trained on openly licensed — not copyrighted — data.

Named “Marey” after cinema trailblazer Étienne-Jules Marey, the model was built in collaboration with Asteria, a newer AI animation studio. Marey was trained on “owned or fully licensed” source data, according to Moonvalley, and offers customization options including fine-grained camera and motion controls. ...

... “Marey enables nuanced control over in-scene movements,” Moonvalley wrote in a press release provided to TechCrunch, “such as controlling the movement of an individual checkers piece, or animating the exact breeze blowing through a person’s hair.” ...

Moonvalley is pitching Marey, which can generate “HD” clips up to 30 seconds in length, as lower risk than competitors, from a legal perspective. ...

Unlike some “unfiltered” video models that readily insert a person’s likeness into clips, Moonvalley is also committing to building guardrails around its creative tooling. Like OpenAI’s Sora, Moonvalley’s models will block certain content, like NSFW phrases, and won’t allow people to prompt them to generate videos of specific people or celebrities. ...

“We’re proving it’s possible to train AI models without brazenly stealing creative work from the creators — the cinematographers, visual artists, creators, and creative producers — whose voices we aim to uplift with our technology,” Moonvalley co-founder and CEO Naeem Talukdar said in a statement. “At Moonvalley, we’re setting a new standard for generative AI to deliver industry-leading AI capabilities while ensuring that the voices and rights of creatives are not lost as this technology and industry evolve.”

See the full story here: https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/12/moonvalley-releases-a-video-generator-it-claims-was-trained-on-licensed-content/