By May 2026 no single i2v model wins across the board. Veo 3 leads on cinematic lighting and native audio. Sora 2 leads on multi-shot character consistency. Seedance 2.0 has the cheapest credit-per-shot ratio with surprisingly strong character motion. Kling 2.5 has the most reliable face animation on close-ups. The market converged toward feature parity faster than anyone expected, then split out by shot type.
What changed in practice: solo creators producing 30 to 60 second shorts now generate the same storyboard panel across three or four models in parallel, cherry-pick the best take per shot, and stitch. The 'one model per project' workflow was abandoned roughly two quarters ago. Krea, the workspace that runs prompts against multiple models simultaneously, has become the cleanest way to do this without juggling four subscriptions.
The pricing story is the second-order effect. As model quality converged, providers compete on credit math. Hailuo 02 is the cost leader at roughly a tenth of Veo 3's per-second cost. Seedance has narrowed the gap. Pure premium positioning is a smaller and smaller market.
For founders shipping AI-generated video as part of their product, the implication is architectural: design the pipeline assuming model choice is a runtime variable, not a build-time decision. The shop most likely to lose the next 12 months is the one that picked a single i2v vendor in 2024 and built tight integrations.
If you're producing AI video content yourself, use Krea to run prompts across three models per shot and cherry-pick. If you're building a product that ships AI video, abstract the model choice behind your own interface so you can swap providers without touching app code.
