“Whilst video content gets more attention than text (and will get even more attention going forward), producing original video can be time and cost intensive.” This is the contention of Zohar Dayan and Yotam Cohen, founders of Wibbitz.
You may have heard of Wibbitz or not, but my bet is that if you’re a frequent online visitor you’ll have stumbled across a Wibbitz produced video. This is automated video content created by slotting text into a piece of software that will find, select and splice together licenced content complete with computer generated voiceover.
What would have taken a human news team at least half a day to film & edit, you can now have in 10 secs ready for upload. Is this progress? With over 10,000 videos a day created for 70 or so publishers it’s a solution to feeding the endless online content maw that demands material to hook in viewers to attract advertising to keep the circus going.
However, is this just video for video’s sake and does the content actually do its job?
The internet revolution is grinding through its phases and pre-online content work flows are truly disrupted, with jobs in print, journalism and even the very ‘ doing’ of filming, editing, photography being replaced by automation.
And yet, a little voice tells me that taking the soul out of the act of creation tends to kill the spark that is key to engaging the very audience publishers so desperately want to attract with their Wibbitz videos.