Newspaper newsrooms have been saying for years that their future is in video. But video remains hard and expensive to produce for organizations whose core competency is the “inverted pyramid” of text news stories. Enter Wibbitz, an Israeli company that wants to help them out.
Wibbitz ingests client publishers’ news articles, runs artificial intelligence on the text and applies algorithms to produce a shortened summary. From there, the company quickly subs the shortened story out to a network of professional voiceover artists. Minutes later, the publishers get a video back incorporating images and a narrative of their piece, like this one…
To CEO Zohar Dayan, the idea is about helping publishers exploit booming commercial opportunities in video.
“There is a lot of demand from advertisers for video content. The problem is, there is a lack of supply,” he tells Beet.TV in this video interview. Producing video content is super-expensive, it’s very heavy on manpower.”
Beet.TV interviewed Dayan last week at the BrightRoll Video Summit in Manhattan.