The business of helping people make videos has quietly become one of the faster-growing segments in software.

What was once a fairly fragmented collection of editing tools for professionals has expanded into a sprawling ecosystem serving everyone from solo content creators to multinational enterprises, and AI has turbocharged the whole thing in ways that were barely imaginable three years ago.

According to Clideo.com, the Cyprus-based platform now processes content for 5 million monthly users and has had 345 million videos created through its tools since launch, which puts it among the more notable players in the browser-based video marker space.

The numbers point to something the bigger software vendors have been slow to acknowledge: a large portion of everyday video production is happening not inside Adobe Premiere or DaVinci Resolve, but in lightweight web tools that anyone can open on a lunch break.

A Market With Big Numbers and Bigger Projections

The global video creation tool market was valued at around $653 billion in 2024 and is projected to nearly double to $1.4 trillion by 2033, growing at a compound annual rate of 8.9%.

Within specific segments, the numbers are more modest but the growth rates are steeper. The AI video generator market specifically was valued at around $717 million in 2025 and is projected to grow at a CAGR of 18.8% through 2034.

The underlying demand driver is straightforward. Video content now accounts for nearly 82% of total internet traffic, and more than 75% of businesses currently use video platforms for marketing, training, or internal communications.

That kind of adoption creates a stable floor of commercial demand that software vendors are competing aggressively to serve.

The AI Shift Changes Everything

The most significant structural change in this market over the past two years has been the maturation of AI-powered video generation. The category has moved from novelty to production tool with remarkable speed.

According to Wistia’s research, the share of professionals using AI to create videos jumped from 18% to 41% in a single year, with additional respondents planning to start soon. IAB data also indicates that 86% of buyers are using or planning to use generative AI to build video ad creative.

The competitive landscape within AI video tools is crowded and shifting. Platforms including Runway, Luma AI, Pika Labs, and Stability AI all enable users to create video content from text prompts or simple inputs.

Runway, founded in 2018, has emerged as an early leader by combining strong model capabilities with a more developed application layer, and it’s currently the only player in the AI video generation category monetizing at scale among the mid-market.

The avatar-based segment, where typed scripts are delivered by a photorealistic AI presenter, has its own competitive dynamics.

HeyGen’s mid-market customer base grew 152% year-over-year as of January 2026, compared to roughly 30% for Synthesia.

However, Synthesia still leads on revenue because its average contract values are more than three times higher than HeyGen’s. Most companies in this category are still single-platform users, meaning the market has not yet fragmented into multi-tool stacks the way some predicted.

One notable recent development illustrates how volatile this space remains.

OpenAI’s Sora, which launched to considerable hype, shut down its app and API in March 2026 after downloads had dropped 75% from their November 2024 peak, with the company citing high compute costs and a strategic pivot toward robotics research.

The episode underscored that model quality alone is not enough in a market where generation speed, pricing structure, and workflow integration matter just as much.

The Business Case for Video Is Effectively Settled

On the marketing side, video adoption has reached saturation levels that would be remarkable in any category. According to Wyzowl’s 2026 report, 91% of businesses now use video as a marketing tool, and 93% of video marketers consider it an essential part of their overall strategy.

YouTube remains the most widely used video marketing channel, with 82% of businesses uploading video content there.

YouTube Shorts alone averages 200 billion daily views, up from 70 billion reported in 2024, according to figures shared at Cannes Lions 2025. The scale of that number reframes what “video marketing” means in practice.

The question businesses are now wrestling with is not whether to produce video but how to produce it fast enough and at sufficient volume to remain visible across increasingly crowded feeds.

The majority of brands now create video in-house (59%), while 32% use a mix of in-house and external production, and just 10% rely exclusively on external vendors.

That shift toward in-house production is one of the primary growth engines for the tooling market because it converts businesses that previously spent on agencies into ongoing software subscribers.

The Traditional Editing Market Holds Steady

Alongside the AI-native tools, the traditional video editing software market continues to grow, though at a more measured pace.

The global video editor market was valued at around $1 billion in 2026 and is expected to reach $1.45 billion by 2035, growing at a CAGR of 4.1%.

Cloud-based editing tools are now used by 48% of content creators, enabling real-time collaboration and scalable workflow management, and the number of freelance and independent video editors globally surpassed 7.3 million in 2024, marking a 22% increase from 2022.

Geographic Picture

North America remains the dominant revenue base across virtually every segment of this market, but Asia-Pacific is where the fastest growth is happening.

The region is advancing at a 15% CAGR and is projected to add $16.2 billion in revenue between 2024 and 2029, fueled by smartphone ubiquity, lower data tariffs, and escalating demand for local-language content. India alone is forecast to deliver over one quarter of incremental premium video revenue.

Chinese-developed tools are also making a stronger showing internationally.

Kling, developed by Kuaishou, has become a credible competitor to Runway on quality metrics while offering a significant cost advantage, with a batch generation API that allows queuing multiple prompts simultaneously with parallel processing across dedicated GPU clusters.

What Comes Next

The near-term trajectory points toward a few clear themes. AI will continue compressing production timelines and costs, which will pressure professional service businesses while expanding the market for self-serve software.

The lines between creation, editing, and distribution tools are blurring as platforms attempt to own more of the workflow.

And measurement remains a persistent weak point: video marketers most commonly quantify ROI using views (67%) and engagement such as likes and shares (63%), with bottom-line sales cited by only 32%. Whoever solves the attribution problem convincingly will have a significant commercial advantage.

Meta’s Movie Gen model, which showed strong benchmark performance in late 2025 but had not yet launched commercially, is expected to enter the market in mid-2026.

Meta’s infrastructure scale and existing social distribution channels could make it a significant competitor to Runway and Kling if the commercial launch matches the research preview quality.

The industry is not short on capital, competition, or ambition.

The practical challenge for buyers is navigating a landscape where the leading tool from six months ago may no longer exist, and where the definition of “professional video” continues to shift downward in terms of both cost and the technical skill required to produce it.