Video Infrastructure Beats Utility Tools
Lenny Bogdonoff, co-founder and CTO of Milk Video, on the video infrastructure value chain
Simple video utilities cap out because they solve a narrow task at low willingness to pay, while the bigger outcome is owning the business workflow around video. Cutting clips, trimming starts, and adding captions are useful, but they are easy to compare, easy to bundle, and increasingly easy for larger platforms to give away. The durable value sits in storing video, searching it, routing it into sales and marketing workflows, and tying usage back to pipeline and revenue.
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Milk describes editing itself as the part that gets commodified first. The more defensible layer is the system around the file, search, brand consistency, sharing, landing pages, and measurement. That is why utility tools found through SEO have a ceiling, while broader video workflow products can support outbound enterprise sales and much higher contract values.
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Gong is the clearest proof point. It turned call recording from a simple feature into a revenue engine by making every sales meeting searchable, coachable, and usable in forecasting and engagement. That expansion helped it reach an estimated $300M ARR in January 2025, far beyond what a standalone trimming or caption tool could support.
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There are still strong utility businesses, but they stay bounded unless they move up the stack. Photoroom grew by solving one concrete job, background removal, then expanded into API driven workflow software for marketplaces and brands. Synthesia followed a similar path in video by bundling generation, editing, translation, and enterprise governance into one system.
The next wave of video software will look less like an editor and more like infrastructure for business communication. Winning products will package creation, storage, search, compliance, analytics, and go to market integrations into one workflow, and that shift will keep pushing simple editing features down into bundles, platforms, and defaults.