According to the Runway ML 2024 technical white paper, the watermark-free version of the image to video ai tool (such as Pika 1.0) mandatorily uses dynamic watermarks 100% when creating videos, with paid plans ($35 and more per month) being able to opt out of watermarks. However, enterprise-level authorization will incur an additional payment of $0.02 per second for watermark removal during generation. For instance, Adobe Firefly Video business plan allows users to export unlimited quantity watermark-free videos on an annual $12,000 budget, keeping 78% of the cost in contrast to conventional film and TV licensing (Data source: Adobe’s Q2 2024 earnings report). But the alpha launch of MidJourney’s ai video creator shows that the watermark-free mode is reserved for business customers with more than $50,000 of annual usage, and generation speed is limited to 2 seconds per frame (up to 0.8 seconds per frame for the watermarked one).
Technical limitations prevent some platforms from completely eliminating watermarks. Independent trials in 2024 determined that in videos created by the open-source Stable Video Diffusion model, nearly 12% of the frames retained semi-transparent watermark pixels (with an RGB value deviation ≤5), requiring manual correction utilizing DaVinci Resolve, where $45 has to be included in the cost of repair per 10 minutes of video. In industrialized movie and television series scenarios, when ILM employs the adaptive image to video ai tool, it has to invest 380,000 US dollars to reconstruct the computing power cluster in order to achieve watermark-free real-time rendering of 8K video (the highest power consumption is 4200W, 22% more than watermarked mode). For instance, in the production of “Transformers 7”, AI-generated explosion effects had 12% of the shots re-shot due to watermark residues, costs an additional budget of 2.7 million US dollars (the case is cited from the July 2024 edition of The Hollywood Reporter).
Legal risks are entangled with business strategies. According to Statista statistics, 63% of global ai video generator infringement lawsuits in 2023 were related to watermark removal. Among them, a certain MCN agency in China had to pay 2.3 million yuan in compensation for batch cracking watermarks (the case originated from the public announcement of the Beijing Internet Court in 2024). Technically, Google DeepMind’s watermark embedding algorithm can boost the recognition accuracy rate to 99.3%, and can continue to identify leftover marks even if the video is compressed to 360p (data available in the NeurIPS 2024 paper). Enterprise business solutions such as Synthesia’s business solution ($96,000 per year) have increased watermark-free video’s 18 times higher copyright traceability efficiency using blockchain proof storage technology, but generation latency has accumulated by 0.4 seconds per frame.
Compliance breakthroughs are currently making headway into the market. In August 2024, the European Union implemented the “AI-Generated Content Identification Act,” wherein industries such as healthcare and education might petition for exemptions for watermark-free creation but would be charged a compliance certification fee of 0.15 euros per second. For example, in the Munich Medical School case, when they used image to video ai in creating teaching anatomy videos, watermark-free generation decreased by 62% after approval and the render speed was also 4K/30fps (the case was taken from the September 2024 issue of Nature Medicine). The open source environment is also behind the changes: The VideoGPT-XL model released by Hugging Face supports a user-trained watermark removal module, achieving a 90% watermark removal rate on NVIDIA A100 GPUs, but for 17 hours of training and a computing power cost of $143. After the November 2024 enactment of China’s “Interim Measures for the Administration of Generative AI Services,” security-audit-ready ai video generator could release watermark-free functions to common users, but the generated logs must be kept for at least three years (policy interpretation based on the official documents of the Cyberspace Administration of China).