What people ask an AI video generator to make: 1,342 short-video requests analysed (Sept 8 – Oct 12, 2026)

One read-only query run against production on 2026-10-16. The base set is every video request created from 2026-09-08 to 2026-10-12 inclusive, excluding the founder's own account and any input shorter than three characters or consisting only of “test”, “asdf”, “hello” or “hi”. That leaves 1,342 requests from 756 people.

with base as (
  select v.*
  from videos v
  join auth.users u on u.id = v.user_id
  where u.email <> :founder   -- excludes the founder's own account
    and v.created_at >= '2026-09-08'
    and v.created_at <  '2026-10-13'
    and v.source_input is not null
    and length(trim(v.source_input)) >= 3
    and v.source_input !~* '^\s*(test|asdf|hello|hi)\s*$'
)

-- Keyword themes: share of base rows where
lower(title || ' ' || source_input) ~ '<pattern>'

-- Indic or Arabic script: share of base rows where
source_input ~ '[ऀ-෿؀-ۿ]'

-- Median input length
percentile_cont(0.5) within group (order by <word count of source_input>)

Caveats, stated rather than buried:

• Keyword themes overlap. One request can match several patterns, so the theme shares do not sum to 100%, and a keyword match is not a human reading — “cat” also matches “category”.
• This is one product's users over five weeks, not the market. Who finds Veedio shapes what they ask for, and a popular tool page pulls its theme up.
• We do not publish how many of these requests finished rendering: a provider outage inside the window would make that number describe the outage, not the requests.
• No individual request is quoted, paraphrased or shown.