A bootstrapped founder with 40 years in broadcast is building an AI entertainment platform where users create finished music videos by chatting with an agent. Shotstack is the rendering layer that assembles every video.
At a glance
| Industry | AI music and entertainment technology |
| Use case | Agent-driven music video creation |
| Products used | Edit API |
| Team | Bootstrapped solo founder |
| Pipeline | AI agent chat → storyboard → Shotstack assembly |
With Shotstack, AGEN Media:
- Lets users go from a chat message to a finished music video with no video skills at all
- Assembles AI generated clips, user uploaded assets, and AI music into final renders through the Edit API
- Runs two creation modes on one rendering layer: a fully automated agent and a manual timeline editor
- Ships new Shotstack features into production the day the release email lands
- Is planning a second Shotstack-powered project; Already on the way!
The challenge: video creation that works like a conversation
AGEN Media’s founder has seen this movie before. He pioneered webcasting software in the late 90s, was an innovator in streaming ad insertion, and sold his company to a major digital audio company in 2009. Now he is building AGEN Media: an Autonomous Generative Entertainment Network where AI creates and publishes music and video end to end.
The video side had a hard problem. Generating a decent AI video costs real money, roughly $30 to $40 with iterations, and storyboarding is daunting for people who just want a music video for their song. His answer was to put an AI agent in front of the whole process: the user describes what they want, and the agent does the rest.
That agent needed a rendering layer it could drive programmatically, one that could assemble generated clips, images, music, and text into a finished video on every request.
The solution: AI agents for users, Shotstack behind the scenes
On AGEN’s platform, users chat with an AI agent, tell it what they want, and the agent builds the storyboard, selects the content, and assembles the edit behind the scenes. Shotstack renders it.
Short AI generated clips are mixed with imagery and AI music, users can upload their own assets into the chain, and the assembled edit is sent to the Shotstack API. The finished video comes back to the platform.
For users who want control, the platform switches to a manual mode with a timeline and storyboard editor. Both modes end at the same place: Shotstack assembles the final video.
“Shotstack has been real crucial for my development.”
Founder, AGEN Media
New capabilities go straight into the agent. The founder reads the release emails and updates his system the same day.
Video for virtual stages, not just social feeds
The videos do not stop at social media, because AGEN’s audience does not stop there either. The platform pipes finished video playlists onto the screens of interactive 3D venues: virtual stages built on platforms like Portals, Unreal Engine, and Roblox.
Artists perform live on a virtual stage, and afterward their videos keep playing on the venue’s screens for the audience. It is a use case most video tooling never imagined, and it needed nothing special from the rendering side. Render once through the API, then play it anywhere: feeds, pages, and 3D worlds.
The results
A one person team shipping a studio: The founder runs the entire operation solo, bootstrapped, with AI writing much of the code. Shotstack means video assembly is one problem he never has to build or babysit.
Video creation without video knowledge: Invited beta users are already producing complete music videos by describing them, with the agent and Shotstack doing everything else.
A second project on the way: The team is so happy with how the first integration turned out that they are already launching another project built on Shotstack.
“Your service has been great. It’s done everything I wanted to do.”
Why AGEN Media chose Shotstack
AGEN’s founder found Shotstack in the most backhanded way possible: on a competitor’s own comparison page. The competitor had “thrown an API out there” with nobody answering support requests, and their comparison table pointed him at the alternatives. Thanks, competitor!
He has re-checked the market since, and stayed.
“Every time I look at the competitors, the cost brought me back.”
Give your agent a rendering layer it can build on
If you are building a platform where an AI agent creates video for your users, you need rendering that behaves the same way every time the agent calls it. That is what Shotstack is for.
Get a free Shotstack API key and render your first video in minutes, or see how agents drive Shotstack in our agentic video editing guide.
Get started with Shotstack's video editing API in two steps:
- Sign up for free to get your API key.
- Send an API request to create your video:
curl --request POST 'https://api.shotstack.io/v1/render' \ --header 'x-api-key: YOUR_API_KEY' \ --data-raw '{ "timeline": { "tracks": [ { "clips": [ { "asset": { "type": "video", "src": "https://shotstack-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/footage/beach-overhead.mp4" }, "start": 0, "length": "auto" } ] } ] }, "output": { "format": "mp4", "size": { "width": 1280, "height": 720 } } }'
Experience Shotstack for yourself.
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