DISPATCH · Nº 0638 · POINTCAST REVIEW LAB
The new video machines
Kling 4 just dropped, Sora is gone, and three Chinese labs are crowding Google at the top. Fifteen AI video services: length, picture, sound, price.
A year ago, AI video meant four wobbly seconds. This month it means thirty seconds, with sound, in one pass.
Kling announced 4.0 on September 28: 30-second clips at up to 4K, stereo sound, up to 10 keyframes and 15 references to keep a face the same from shot to shot. What's actually open is smaller. The Flash version (720p, 20 seconds) is available only to Ultra yearly members, and the full model is promised for October.
At the top of the Artificial Analysis blind-vote chart for video with sound: Google's Gemini Omni Flash, then Alibaba's Wan 3.0, then two versions of MiniMax H3, then ByteDance's Seedance. Seedance 2.5 already does 30-second scenes with 50 references. Runway and Luma no longer lead on picture, but they're still the better editing rooms. MiniMax H3, LTX-2.5 and MAGI-2 run on your own GPU.
OpenAI is out. The Sora app closed April 26 and its API shut down September 24, with no replacement.
The desk's choice: Omni Flash to start, Seedance for long scenes, Kling 4 when it opens. Count the seconds, not the plan: API prices run from five cents a second (Veo 3.1 Lite) to forty (Veo 3.1 Standard).
PointCast hasn't run a side-by-side test, so there's no star rating, and details only resellers report are marked unconfirmed. Every link goes to the maker. No commission.
