8 ms·

As Online Video Surges, Publishers Turn to Automation

57 points by otoolep 10y ago

6stringmerc 10y ago
Oh, it's an automated video summary of otherwise existing content. Pardon me if I'm not really impressed. I was expecting something along the reach and challenge akin to 'automated' or 'machine generated' music, of which this might be similar but seems far, far less difficult. Cliff's Notes videos are useful I suppose.
1_2__3 10y ago
This just absolutely stinks of "we want to create more content without having to pay for it, how can we convince people to look at ads when they view it". There's no attempt to do anything here but just hoover up dollars.
CPLX 10y ago
In the early days of TV people often read newspapers into the camera. Early movies were often essentially vaudeville shows on the screen. Those things fill space for a minute then fade quickly. I think one can say with confidence that nobody really wants to watch automatically generated title and clip art videos. Which means this trend will soon pass.
- AJ007 10y ago
  I saw Bloomberg doing this quite a while back so it is growing not shrinking. If it is auto-play, the content doesn't actually exist for the consumer, it is there to tell the advertiser they are buying an ad for content. It is like a more advanced version of old school blackhat SEO scripts which would scrape content and then mash it up so it would appear original and unique to Google. In some cases these publishers may not even have real humans watching those ads.
  - CPLX 10y ago
    Yup, you nailed it. It's robots making "content" for other robots to "watch" in order for yet more robots to auto-magically-bid on ads to show that second set of robots so the people who own the first set of robots can make a little bit of money.
    - r00fus 10y ago
      The future of our finance (as predicted by Charlie Stross): by robots, of robots, for robots. If it reads like the "America InAction" definition of Corporate Robotocracy, feel good that it's least a more likely dystopian future than nuclear holocaust.
    - visarga 10y ago
      This is strangely similar to generative adversarial training in neural nets. They are composed of a generator and a discriminator. The generator has the purpose to generate examples that fool the discriminator and vice-versa. They improve together, iteratively. It's a smart approach but has stability problems in training, because both the generator and the discriminator have to be balanced. Maybe they could try to apply this kind of technique to improve their auto-generated articles to the point where they can't be distinguished from those created by humans, and at the same time, fool the FB bots which filter the feeds.
- hellameta 10y ago
  How about taking into account how consumption of this content has changed? This kind of stuff is great for mobile consumption, which, as far as I understand, is growing at a rapid pace.
  - CPLX 10y ago
    > This kind of stuff is great No, it's awful. In the "what media people like to consume" business that's still a useful metric.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - Kadin 10y ago
    > This kind of stuff is great for mobile consumption To whom? Most people I know are more incensed at autoplaying video on their smartphones even more than on the desktop. Their audio is more likely to be turned up on their phone, and it's harder to turn it off, which is what most people immediately do.
jawns 10y ago
Former newspaper editor here. One thing that strikes me is that these auto-generated videos add no additional information to news reports; they merely present the content in a different way. While that may be a way to broaden consumption of the content -- the auto-playing videos on Facebook feeds is a good example -- I don't think it does much to change readers'/viewers' perception of the quality of that content. If anything, it has the potential to cause them to perceive it as of lower quality than if they'd just read the article it was based on. I see this as the next version of slideshows. News orgs used to like them because each new slide could be treated as a new page view. But readers found them to be, at best, of little additional value, and at worst, really frustrating to get through. What news orgs really need is to invest resources to automate things that increase readers' perception of quality, and then figure out a way to monetize them, rather than looking at ways to monetize and then figuring out how to package content to fit the monetization strategy. One initiative that can do that -- and this is where I think more resources should be invested -- is data science. Sifting through large public datasets and identifying trends, aberrations, etc. is something a computer can do as well or better than a human, and I would imagine that the fruits of those investments would be ripe for monetization. Just one example: We have become conditioned to expect news content to be free, but we're more willing to pay for services. So imagine a news org that said, "Hey, we'll let you view all of our articles for free ... but then for a dollar a pop, you can sign up to receive an instant email notification when we publish a follow-up to a story you are interested in." I'd pay $1 to get notifications of follow-up stories to a particularly enthralling court case, or some local news of significant relevance to me. Best part is, news orgs already largely have the metadata that would make such a service work. They just need to invest in making computers do the work.
- AJ007 10y ago
  Can publishers handle advanced math? They are taking the same audience, same advertisers, and just dividing it up in to more pieces - and like you said, at a lower quality. I suspect the growth in online advertising has done a good job in masking the long term destruction being done to the publisher's revenue. Facebook has made it rain for a few years. That is coming to an end just as Google rolls its news traffic over to AMP. I don't want to own any publicly traded publishers right now. Auto generated video is just a grab for using press release content for auto play video ads. Upon closer inspection, there is really no business left. It looks more like Demand Media's content farm now, to see who can provide the thinnest layer between traffic source & advertiser. The business I see is Google/FB providing the audience and Google/FB providing the advertisers. Making a higher quantity of videos no one wants to see is not going to recapture ad dollars from some kid playing a video game that an audience wants to see. The only thing that amazes me is how many big publishers, including popular tech blogs, are able to run sites which barely function on a late model iPhone. I have no idea what metrics they are looking at. The past few months I've gone back to RSS feeds and bloggers so I can get readable content again. An end to my worthless rant is publishers will probably have to deal with less glamour and focus on producing extremely high quality content that users will pay for. Most verticals have no market for paid content. Those probably have to turn in to donor based non-profits or business models shift to selling products.
niftich 10y ago
Maybe future generations will develop some tolerance or actual interest for this kind of video-from-blog-post format [1], but I find it irksome. Speedup tricks aside, video is unskimmable, so I can't consume it at my own pace unlike I can with text. But I understand, from a business perspective, the appeal of: - preroll ads, which are (as of this moment) harder to block than other types of ads - the promise of organic 'virality' brought upon by a visually stimulating format - the desire to use automation to cut down on the human element of producing such converted content [1] https://youtu.be/M5OGd_S9mxc https://youtu.be/M5OGd_S9mxc
danso 10y ago
For those of us in the news industry, "tronc" has been the entertaining/depressing meme of the summer: https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2016/06/02/tribune-co-now-tronc-issues-worst-press-release-in-the-history-of-journalism/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2016/06/... Several years ago, a developer at the Los Angeles Times (part of Tribune Publishing) created one of the most simple yet useful examples of automated journalism: Quakebot https://source.opennews.org/en-US/articles/how-break-news-while-you-sleep/ https://source.opennews.org/en-US/articles/how-break-news-wh... Quakebot still has a byline and its own section on the LAT website [0], but it remains mostly unchanged since its first reveal (perhaps its implementation is more automated, but its public output is about the same). That Quakebot -- and all the other ways that public data can be efficiently harnessed as a service to readers and reporters alike -- isn't talked about in Tronc's buzzword-heavy press releases about machine learning and artificial intelligence is, IMHO, indicative of Tronc's questionable aims and viability. [0] http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-earthquakesa-earthquake-34-quake-strikes-near-cobb-calif-0lglvn-story.html http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-earthquakesa-earthq...
- Natsu 10y ago
  I'm honestly surprised they haven't yet replaced news anchors with something akin to a Vocaloid.
- Animats 10y ago
  Yes, "Tronc" was a huge step down for the once-famous Chicago Tribune. I wrote in to their "Colonel Tribune" columnist, and got back a rather sad reply. The National Weather Service has an API endpoint [1] which returns weather forecasts in XML. Put in a latitude and longitude, and it calculates a forecast for that location. The data is returned in a structured format. This is the underlying data for most weather sites. One XML item is <wordedForecast>, which looks like this: WEATHER FORECAST FOR 2 MILES SE SAN JOSE INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT CA ON JULY 11TH AT 2:34 AM. TODAY, JULY 11TH: SUNNY, WITH A HIGH NEAR 81. NORTHWEST WIND 6 TO 16 MPH, WITH GUSTS AS HIGH AS 21 MPH. TONIGHT, JULY 11TH: MOSTLY CLEAR, WITH A LOW AROUND 55. NORTH WIND 16 TO 21 MPH DECREASING TO 7 TO 12 MPH AFTER MIDNIGHT. WINDS COULD GUST AS HIGH AS 26 MPH. That's what you hear in broadcast radio weather broadcasts. [1] http://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=%1.4f&lon=%1.4f&unit=0&lg=english&FcstType=dwml http://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=%1.4f&lon=%1.4f... (fill in lat and lon).
Alex3917 10y ago
Just today I noticed that autogenerated github activity visualizations are showing up as the first results when searching YouTube for various software projects. This is extremely annoying, and I hope YouTube bans or at least deranks them.
stuart78 10y ago
It seems like services like these could be more helpful with author involvement. The example DHL clip, for example, helps tell the story visually, and if the article's author were involved in assembling a video package (without needing to learn complicated video production software) he or she could write a complimentary script and have a great video summary right alongside the more in depth text article.
donretag 10y ago
I would not to say that online video is surging, more like it is being forced. Nowadays, it is difficult to read an article on a news site without having some associated video being autoplayed (with advertisement of course). I want to read an article, not watch it. On a side note, is there a way to disable these videos? I do not believe in blocking ads since a publisher should have a monetary gain for producing content, but I do NOT want video. Ever. Unless it is Youtube or Vimeo and the like of course.
- lockes5hadow 10y ago
  Flashblock blocks most of the videos on news sites.
  - kale 10y ago
    That's been less effective lately, so I've also added an HTML5 autoplay blocker. It's fairly effective. Not sure how much it prevents from loading to save on data, but at least it prevents being halfway down the page reading and suddenly having noise come from the speakers.
- Vexs 10y ago
  You could probably set up uMatrix rules to block the video provider.
- atria 10y ago
  Autplaying videos infuriate me. I've given up after trying to configure chrome to stop autoplaying videos. Now I just turn off javascript and only enable it for the sites I need javascript.
  - r00fus 10y ago
    That actually sounds like a good overall security policy as well.
    - duaneb 10y ago
petercooper 10y ago
Is there a video production language/scripting tool for doing this sort of thing? Sort of like an ImageMagick for video. So you can put a certain graphic at a certain time, composite other source videos, do transitions, etc. All scripted in code, no hands on work required.
- jjn2009 10y ago
  ffmpeg is what you are looking for.
- niftich 10y ago
  Avisynth [1] is what you're looking for. You write scripts that programmatically specify what to apply to the video. [1] http://avisynth.nl/index.php/Main_Page http://avisynth.nl/index.php/Main_Page
  - are595 10y ago
    Just wanted to add that it's a super powerful tool with a ton of plugins developed by really knowledgeable people. The programming can have sections of parallel code and sections of serial code combined in cool ways, and you can pipe the output right to encoders like x264.

57 points by otoolep 10y ago

Oh, it's an automated video summary of otherwise existing content. Pardon me if I'm not really impressed. I was expecting something along the reach and challenge akin to 'automated' or 'machine generated' music, of which this might be similar but seems far, far less difficult. Cliff's Notes videos are useful I suppose.

1_2__3 10y ago

This just absolutely stinks of "we want to create more content without having to pay for it, how can we convince people to look at ads when they view it". There's no attempt to do anything here but just hoover up dollars.

CPLX 10y ago

In the early days of TV people often read newspapers into the camera. Early movies were often essentially vaudeville shows on the screen. Those things fill space for a minute then fade quickly. I think one can say with confidence that nobody really wants to watch automatically generated title and clip art videos. Which means this trend will soon pass.

AJ007 10y ago
I saw Bloomberg doing this quite a while back so it is growing not shrinking. If it is auto-play, the content doesn't actually exist for the consumer, it is there to tell the advertiser they are buying an ad for content. It is like a more advanced version of old school blackhat SEO scripts which would scrape content and then mash it up so it would appear original and unique to Google. In some cases these publishers may not even have real humans watching those ads.
- CPLX 10y ago
  Yup, you nailed it. It's robots making "content" for other robots to "watch" in order for yet more robots to auto-magically-bid on ads to show that second set of robots so the people who own the first set of robots can make a little bit of money.
  - r00fus 10y ago
    The future of our finance (as predicted by Charlie Stross): by robots, of robots, for robots. If it reads like the "America InAction" definition of Corporate Robotocracy, feel good that it's least a more likely dystopian future than nuclear holocaust.
  - visarga 10y ago
    This is strangely similar to generative adversarial training in neural nets. They are composed of a generator and a discriminator. The generator has the purpose to generate examples that fool the discriminator and vice-versa. They improve together, iteratively. It's a smart approach but has stability problems in training, because both the generator and the discriminator have to be balanced. Maybe they could try to apply this kind of technique to improve their auto-generated articles to the point where they can't be distinguished from those created by humans, and at the same time, fool the FB bots which filter the feeds.
hellameta 10y ago
How about taking into account how consumption of this content has changed? This kind of stuff is great for mobile consumption, which, as far as I understand, is growing at a rapid pace.
- CPLX 10y ago
  > This kind of stuff is great No, it's awful. In the "what media people like to consume" business that's still a useful metric.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- Kadin 10y ago
  > This kind of stuff is great for mobile consumption To whom? Most people I know are more incensed at autoplaying video on their smartphones even more than on the desktop. Their audio is more likely to be turned up on their phone, and it's harder to turn it off, which is what most people immediately do.

jawns 10y ago

Former newspaper editor here. One thing that strikes me is that these auto-generated videos add no additional information to news reports; they merely present the content in a different way. While that may be a way to broaden consumption of the content -- the auto-playing videos on Facebook feeds is a good example -- I don't think it does much to change readers'/viewers' perception of the quality of that content. If anything, it has the potential to cause them to perceive it as of lower quality than if they'd just read the article it was based on. I see this as the next version of slideshows. News orgs used to like them because each new slide could be treated as a new page view. But readers found them to be, at best, of little additional value, and at worst, really frustrating to get through. What news orgs really need is to invest resources to automate things that increase readers' perception of quality, and then figure out a way to monetize them, rather than looking at ways to monetize and then figuring out how to package content to fit the monetization strategy. One initiative that can do that -- and this is where I think more resources should be invested -- is data science. Sifting through large public datasets and identifying trends, aberrations, etc. is something a computer can do as well or better than a human, and I would imagine that the fruits of those investments would be ripe for monetization. Just one example: We have become conditioned to expect news content to be free, but we're more willing to pay for services. So imagine a news org that said, "Hey, we'll let you view all of our articles for free ... but then for a dollar a pop, you can sign up to receive an instant email notification when we publish a follow-up to a story you are interested in." I'd pay $1 to get notifications of follow-up stories to a particularly enthralling court case, or some local news of significant relevance to me. Best part is, news orgs already largely have the metadata that would make such a service work. They just need to invest in making computers do the work.

AJ007 10y ago
Can publishers handle advanced math? They are taking the same audience, same advertisers, and just dividing it up in to more pieces - and like you said, at a lower quality. I suspect the growth in online advertising has done a good job in masking the long term destruction being done to the publisher's revenue. Facebook has made it rain for a few years. That is coming to an end just as Google rolls its news traffic over to AMP. I don't want to own any publicly traded publishers right now. Auto generated video is just a grab for using press release content for auto play video ads. Upon closer inspection, there is really no business left. It looks more like Demand Media's content farm now, to see who can provide the thinnest layer between traffic source & advertiser. The business I see is Google/FB providing the audience and Google/FB providing the advertisers. Making a higher quantity of videos no one wants to see is not going to recapture ad dollars from some kid playing a video game that an audience wants to see. The only thing that amazes me is how many big publishers, including popular tech blogs, are able to run sites which barely function on a late model iPhone. I have no idea what metrics they are looking at. The past few months I've gone back to RSS feeds and bloggers so I can get readable content again. An end to my worthless rant is publishers will probably have to deal with less glamour and focus on producing extremely high quality content that users will pay for. Most verticals have no market for paid content. Those probably have to turn in to donor based non-profits or business models shift to selling products.

niftich 10y ago

Maybe future generations will develop some tolerance or actual interest for this kind of video-from-blog-post format [1], but I find it irksome. Speedup tricks aside, video is unskimmable, so I can't consume it at my own pace unlike I can with text. But I understand, from a business perspective, the appeal of: - preroll ads, which are (as of this moment) harder to block than other types of ads - the promise of organic 'virality' brought upon by a visually stimulating format - the desire to use automation to cut down on the human element of producing such converted content [1] https://youtu.be/M5OGd_S9mxc https://youtu.be/M5OGd_S9mxc

danso 10y ago

For those of us in the news industry, "tronc" has been the entertaining/depressing meme of the summer: https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2016/06/02/tribune-co-now-tronc-issues-worst-press-release-in-the-history-of-journalism/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2016/06/... Several years ago, a developer at the Los Angeles Times (part of Tribune Publishing) created one of the most simple yet useful examples of automated journalism: Quakebot https://source.opennews.org/en-US/articles/how-break-news-while-you-sleep/ https://source.opennews.org/en-US/articles/how-break-news-wh... Quakebot still has a byline and its own section on the LAT website [0], but it remains mostly unchanged since its first reveal (perhaps its implementation is more automated, but its public output is about the same). That Quakebot -- and all the other ways that public data can be efficiently harnessed as a service to readers and reporters alike -- isn't talked about in Tronc's buzzword-heavy press releases about machine learning and artificial intelligence is, IMHO, indicative of Tronc's questionable aims and viability. [0] http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-earthquakesa-earthquake-34-quake-strikes-near-cobb-calif-0lglvn-story.html http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-earthquakesa-earthq...

Natsu 10y ago
I'm honestly surprised they haven't yet replaced news anchors with something akin to a Vocaloid.
Animats 10y ago
Yes, "Tronc" was a huge step down for the once-famous Chicago Tribune. I wrote in to their "Colonel Tribune" columnist, and got back a rather sad reply. The National Weather Service has an API endpoint [1] which returns weather forecasts in XML. Put in a latitude and longitude, and it calculates a forecast for that location. The data is returned in a structured format. This is the underlying data for most weather sites. One XML item is <wordedForecast>, which looks like this: WEATHER FORECAST FOR 2 MILES SE SAN JOSE INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT CA ON JULY 11TH AT 2:34 AM. TODAY, JULY 11TH: SUNNY, WITH A HIGH NEAR 81. NORTHWEST WIND 6 TO 16 MPH, WITH GUSTS AS HIGH AS 21 MPH. TONIGHT, JULY 11TH: MOSTLY CLEAR, WITH A LOW AROUND 55. NORTH WIND 16 TO 21 MPH DECREASING TO 7 TO 12 MPH AFTER MIDNIGHT. WINDS COULD GUST AS HIGH AS 26 MPH. That's what you hear in broadcast radio weather broadcasts. [1] http://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=%1.4f&lon=%1.4f&unit=0&lg=english&FcstType=dwml http://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=%1.4f&lon=%1.4f... (fill in lat and lon).

Alex3917 10y ago

Just today I noticed that autogenerated github activity visualizations are showing up as the first results when searching YouTube for various software projects. This is extremely annoying, and I hope YouTube bans or at least deranks them.

stuart78 10y ago

It seems like services like these could be more helpful with author involvement. The example DHL clip, for example, helps tell the story visually, and if the article's author were involved in assembling a video package (without needing to learn complicated video production software) he or she could write a complimentary script and have a great video summary right alongside the more in depth text article.

donretag 10y ago

I would not to say that online video is surging, more like it is being forced. Nowadays, it is difficult to read an article on a news site without having some associated video being autoplayed (with advertisement of course). I want to read an article, not watch it. On a side note, is there a way to disable these videos? I do not believe in blocking ads since a publisher should have a monetary gain for producing content, but I do NOT want video. Ever. Unless it is Youtube or Vimeo and the like of course.

lockes5hadow 10y ago
Flashblock blocks most of the videos on news sites.
- kale 10y ago
  That's been less effective lately, so I've also added an HTML5 autoplay blocker. It's fairly effective. Not sure how much it prevents from loading to save on data, but at least it prevents being halfway down the page reading and suddenly having noise come from the speakers.
Vexs 10y ago
You could probably set up uMatrix rules to block the video provider.
atria 10y ago
Autplaying videos infuriate me. I've given up after trying to configure chrome to stop autoplaying videos. Now I just turn off javascript and only enable it for the sites I need javascript.
- r00fus 10y ago
  That actually sounds like a good overall security policy as well.
  - duaneb 10y ago

petercooper 10y ago

Is there a video production language/scripting tool for doing this sort of thing? Sort of like an ImageMagick for video. So you can put a certain graphic at a certain time, composite other source videos, do transitions, etc. All scripted in code, no hands on work required.

jjn2009 10y ago
ffmpeg is what you are looking for.
niftich 10y ago
Avisynth [1] is what you're looking for. You write scripts that programmatically specify what to apply to the video. [1] http://avisynth.nl/index.php/Main_Page http://avisynth.nl/index.php/Main_Page
- are595 10y ago
  Just wanted to add that it's a super powerful tool with a ton of plugins developed by really knowledgeable people. The programming can have sections of parallel code and sections of serial code combined in cool ways, and you can pipe the output right to encoders like x264.