In
a television appearance in early June, Michael W. Ferro Jr., the
chairman of the newspaper and magazine publishing company Tronc —
formerly known as Tribune Publishing — made an astonishing claim.
“Right now we’re doing a couple hundred videos a day,” he said. “We think we need to be doing 2,000 videos a day.”
Mr.
Ferro’s comments added to mounting confusion over his embattled
company’s sudden rebranding. How could a newspaper publisher create
nearly three-quarters of a million videos a year?
But
as jarring as Tronc’s goals may sound, the company’s plan is far from
novel. In pursuit of more lucrative video advertising and success on
dominant social platforms like Facebook, a growing number of publishers
have turned to technology that promises to streamline video production,
sometimes to the point of near-full automation.
The
market for this service is largely split between two companies, Wochit
and Wibbitz, which both maintain offices in New York City and Tel Aviv.
(Wochit also has an office in London.) Wibbitz’s customers include
Bonnier magazines, Hearst, Gannett and the Weather Channel, which uses
the service to create local news reports. Customers of Wochit have
included Time Inc., CBS Interactive, The Huffington Post, Rotten
Tomatoes and NowThis News.
“Traditionally
we’ve employed teams — someone out shooting and someone able to cut up
and produce the video,” said Chris Pirrone, who manages USA Today’s
digital sports publications. “Doing that is one, expensive, and two,
takes a while to turn around. That’s where we’ve found these tools
useful.”
The
two services’ automation features work in similar ways. They analyze,
and may summarize, text, be it a script or a traditional news article,
and then automatically find photographs and video clips to go with it.
The services typically get the videos and images from sources like The
Associated Press and Getty Images.
Additionally,
the tools offer the option to quickly put large animated captions over
the videos, in a format that has become popular on Facebook, where
videos begin playing automatically and are often watched with the sound
off. Each can also supply, through a third party, on-demand human
narration; Wibbitz offers computerized voice-overs as well.
The
level of human intervention before publishing is up to the clients.
They can be hands-on from the start, making edits, adding original
material and using the tools to speed things along. Or they can let the
machines do almost all the work — betting that it will be good enough
for viewers — or, at least, for advertisers. Wibbitz can scan a website
and create a “rough cut” video for every published article.
Wochit
clients produce about 30,000 videos a month, according to the company, a
number that has doubled since January. Wibbitz says it has twice as
many clients now as it did at the start of the year, and the number of
videos published using the company’s software has increased more than
sixfold in the same time period.
“The
way we see it, we can help you increase your video inventory in a very
significant way,” said Zohar Dayan, a co-founder and chief executive of
Wibbitz.
There
is also the promise of money. Many publishers, like Tronc, are
searching for ways to increase online revenue, as revenue from web
advertising remains stubbornly low and print revenue continues to
decline. Video advertisements tend to warrant higher rates than other
online ads.
Video Feature
Videos With an Automatic Assist
Automatically generated videos are appearing in growing
numbers on news companies’ websites and social pages, but they’re not
always easy to spot. Here are a few examples.
Wibbitz
and Wochit split advertising revenue with some publishers; Wochit sells
subscriptions as well. Some sites are adding the videos on the same
page as a related story. Often, the videos — preloaded with ad spots —
start playing automatically.
Wochit
and Wibbitz also suggested that interest has surged, in part, as
publishers rush to accommodate demand for more video on Facebook and
other social services. At a conference in June, a Facebook vice
president described video
as “the best way to tell stories in this world” and suggested that the
service would be “probably all video” in five years, echoing earlier
claims by the social network’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg.
Tech
giants have dabbled in forms of automated video production, albeit for
different sorts of customers. In 2014, Facebook generated personalized
“Look Back” videos from user profiles to celebrate the company’s 10th
anniversary. Last week, the company rolled out a “slide show” feature,
which automatically stitches together images from users’ photo
collections into short videos, in its iPhone app.
In
June, Google released the highly automated video production tool
YouTube Director, intended to encourage business owners to make video
ads.
Publishers
are cautiously optimistic about the potential of video automation
tools, and not just for the pre-existing tasks that they make cheaper
and faster. But publishers are keenly aware of how quickly new online
formats can be commoditized, and, after years of chasing traffic — most
recently from Google and Facebook — how rapidly advantages can
evaporate.
Mr. Pirrone of USA Today said his sites were already moving beyond straightforward conversion of articles into videos.
“The
data came back very quickly that text-to-video alone, if you don’t
touch it, consumers can quickly recognize it is not a high-quality
product,” Mr. Pirrone said.
Mr. Dayan of Wibbitz said, “There still needs to be a human, a process, to give that personal touch.”
In
the longer term, publishers’ plans for these tools may be less about
industrial-scale article conversion than giving an extra set of tools —
and responsibilities — to journalists. Publishers described the services
as supplemental to more conventional video teams, freeing up resources
and letting nonspecialist employees make videos as well.
“The
way we create video hasn’t changed in decades,” said Dror Ginzberg, a
founder and the chief executive of Wochit, who characterized Wochit’s
features as an extension of capabilities and shortcuts provided by
existing video production software.
As
for Tronc and its 2,000-a-day video goal, Wibbitz counts among its
investors NantMobile, a firm headed by the biotech billionaire Dr.
Patrick Soon-Shiong, who happens to be the second-largest stakeholder in
Tronc. Neither company would say whether they had a partnership;
representatives for Tronc said that its automated video production would
be a mixture of “internal and external” technologies. Some Tronc
properties currently publish videos bearing a Wochit logo; Gannett,
which recently initiated a hostile takeover of Tronc, has used Wochit
and Wibbitz.
In
a video created for employees but released publicly in June, Malcolm
CasSelle, Tronc’s chief technology officer, laid out his company’s
rationale. “The C.P.M. that we can earn with a video, or visualized
content, is significantly higher than a page without it,” he said,
referring to advertising rates on news articles.
The
company stood by its plans. “When it comes to video, we can monetize
our video best within the player on our site,” said Anne Vasquez, the
company’s chief digital officer, referring to a plan to include video on
half of all article pages by next year.
“Video is video,” Mr. CasSelle said. “We’re producing it because it’s strategic and important.”
He
added: “We’re also going to continue to augment with these tools. It
could be that the augmented video is so efficient that it outpaces
human-generated video.”
