
As Online Video Surges, Publishers Turn to Automation - otoolep
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/11/business/media/as-online-video-surges-publishers-turn-to-automation.html
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jawns
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
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.

~~~
Retric
Advertising has held fairly steady as a percentage of US GDP for ~100+ years
(1-2%). However, GDP has grown so there is room for more players esp if the
growth is in a tiny sector of advertising spending. Further, It's at the low
end of it's normal 1-2% band we might see a bounce back if the economy starts
taking off.

[http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-03-03/advertisin...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-03-03/advertisings-
century-of-flat-line-growth)

------
donretag
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.

~~~
atria
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
That actually sounds like a good overall security policy as well.

~~~
duaneb
It's amazing how many javascript problems can manifest in subtle degradation
of sites instead of complete breakage. Be warned.

------
danso
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/...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-
wemple/wp/2016/06/02/tribune-co-now-tronc-issues-worst-press-release-in-the-
history-of-journalism/)

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-wh...](https://source.opennews.org/en-US/articles/how-break-news-while-
you-sleep/)

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-
earthq...](http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-earthquakesa-
earthquake-34-quake-strikes-near-cobb-calif-0lglvn-story.html)

~~~
Animats
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...](http://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=%1.4f&lon=%1.4f&unit=0&lg=english&FcstType=dwml)
(fill in lat and lon).

~~~
superuser2
(Note that, if you have a NOAA-capable radio, you can also have this read to
you in a the NWS's classic, distinctive robot voice. Brings back memories of
waiting with my family for the tornado warnings to pass as we holed up in the
basement).

~~~
Kadin
> you can also have this read to you in a the NWS's classic, distinctive robot
> voice

That "robot voice" is relatively new. Not _that_ long ago, it was a tape loop
of a person reading the forecast, played over and over and updated every few
hours. Definitely into the late 90s I think.

In my childhood home we had a radio with a "weather" button that, when
pressed, would turn the radio on and tune it to one of the standard NOAA
frequencies for a set amount of time (probably about a minute or so). It was
astonishingly useful, on par with the Amazon Echo I have today and use for a
similar purpose, but with probably six orders of magnitude fewer transistors
involved. Simple, but effective.

------
CPLX
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.

~~~
hellameta
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
> 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.

------
niftich
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)

------
1_2__3
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.

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6stringmerc
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.

------
Alex3917
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.

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stuart78
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.

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petercooper
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.

~~~
niftich
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
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.

