The Next Medium: Why Real-Time Interactive Video Changes Everything — Ahmed Ahres, Reactor
Reactor is building infrastructure to make video programmable and interactive in real time
“what happens when video becomes programmable like software”
Ahmed Ahres of Reactor argues that current AI video generation (VO3, CogVideo) is passive and non-interactive — a 'slot machine' — and the next leap is real-time interactive video where pixels are generated on-the-fly, making video programmable like software. Reactor, a Series A startup, is building the developer platform and infrastructure to enable this. The thesis reframes 'world models' not as Gaussian splatting or passive video generation, but as real-time interactivity, which would fundamentally change how content is produced and consumed.