Digital publishers have seen the future, and it is video. Mark Zuckerberg says so.
Wochit, which helps publishers make lots of videos, really fast, raised $13 million
These things aren’t going to make themselves (yet).
Peter Kafka covered media and technology, and their intersection, at Vox. Many of his stories can be found in his Kafka on Media newsletter, and he also hosts the Recode Media podcast.
But videos aren’t tweets or pictures of your kids: Someone has to create them, and that takes time.
Enter Wochit, a startup that helps publishers speed things up via software that can create videos with minimal human intervention. Wochit says its service allows more than 350 clients, including Time Inc, USA Today and Tronc (Tronc!), to produce 1,200 videos a day.
You can read more about the process here and here. And while Wochit founder and CEO Dror Ginzberg stresses that the stuff his software makes isn’t completely automated, the whole point is that it allows publishers to at least partly automate the process, so they can make videos at a “very high scale.”
“We know that our clients do not want a fully automated piece,” Ginzberg said. “Usually a fully automated piece lacks the uniqueness that’s integral to your brand.”
Here’s a Wochit-produced clip for CBS, which has generated 73 million Facebook video views in a month. Caveats: They are Facebook video views, and the clip is about pandas:
Ginzberg has just raised $13 million in funding, some of which comes from strategic investors/Wochit customers like ProSieben. Existing investors, including Redpoint, also chipped in. The company, based in Tel Aviv and New York, has raised $28 million in total.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
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