As the HKUST delegation of the trip to Israel held by Techcracker Lab. Besides forming a team from members of all the university students to join a competition, we gained fruitful exposure to the startup culture by visiting the local co-working places, techno on university and also many startup companies.
One of the most remarkable startup is Wibbitz. Here is a little self introduction made by Wibbitz:
Imagine that instead of reading this article, you're watching a video clip of an announcer reading it to you over a progression of related photographs and video clips. The Israeli start-up Wibbitz is helping make this scenario possible with a new software platform that allows users to transform any piece of text into a video segment in less than 20 seconds, and without any additional effort by the content producer.
Wibbitz was founded in 2011 by Dayan and partner Yotam Cohen. Soon thereafter, Wibbitz released a free product that enables content producers to transform their website headlines or most-read article sections into video clips. In the clips, the headlines are read aloud, much like news bulletins and presented on backgrounds created by the website's graphic design elements or Wibbitz's color themes.
At the moment, the company has a more advanced product in the beta-testing stage, which will be launched within three weeks. This premium product will turn whole text-based articles from news, sports, entertainment and financial sites into video clips. For example, an article about the singer Adele would be accompanied by audio narration taken from the text and enriched with photographs of Adele and video clips of her taken from the Internet, as well as dynamic info graphics. Instead of reading the article, the user will then be able to view it as a video. Wibbitz expects that large news organizations around the globe will use the product.
The company’s next step will be to let users turn any page of text into a dynamic video clip through browser plug-ins and apps. To achieve this goal, the company is working with smart device manufacturers.
"The company's vision is that everyone will be able to consume text-based content in a simple, laid back fashion," says Dayan. "Today, creating video content requires resources and time."
Dayan continues, "Essentially, we make it possible to create broadcast-quality video within seconds. Until now, if I wanted to create a video I needed to shoot some video and then edit it in a long and expensive process. Today, it takes us 15 to 20 seconds."
After the visit, I cannot stop thinking about the idea of integrating the service provided by Wibbitz into one local news publishers.
In Hong Kong, there is 400 million Fb users, it is a great market for traditional newspaper who have been too risk averse to enter the new media market. Weather it is a great idea to propose introducing Wibbitz to Hong Kong and make it integrated to local news publishers worth further studies
For the technology, in addition to searching images on the internet, Wibbitz can quickly summarise an article from a long passage into a good fit video and get the main point. It can also automatically convert data and statistics into to charts for easy readability. It also has embed voice over caption
Wibbitz has made its product a fantastic product/market fit. The current problem of the world is overflow of information, there is too much media. Because of fast food culture of internet usage,less and less people stop by to read a text . Internet users are becoming lazier to fetch info. Only images and videoes can catch their eyes, writing? no...
To some readers, they need to have trustful source of news with ease.
To traditional news publishers, like Sing Tao News ( one local news publisher who publish english newspaper The Standard), they need to attract more online customer and compete with other online media.
The strength of Sing Tao is the built creditability and customer access, but it is losing their views because of competition of social media, free online publication and internet platform.
By using Wibbutz which automatically create beautiful video summaries out of text articles, Sing Tao can exposure more their news to internet users and attract source of customers. Wibbitz can monetarize by taking part of the Ad revenue of the news website and integrated video Ad.
The new media channel can be complimentary to the printed market, not as competitors.
Recently, it is not difficult to hear about the news of acquisition by competitiors and bankruptcy of tradional promted media. The objectives of adding Wibbitz service shall not be retaining current readers, but to expand the readership, to attract internet users to watch the video and then enter the news website , and ,hence, increase the exposure of the news website to the public and increase the click rate of the website. It is cost saving for publisher to generate a media rich content using Wibbitz.
By watching the Wibbitz video feeds, viewers may get interested to click into the original text news article webpage. Also, the videos can be shared on the Facebook, ppl can share
In HK online news market, Apple Daily has taken the initiative to provide humorous video feeds and CGI animation to portray news articles in Chinese. 動新聞, in English it means "News in action” is appealing to most youngsters and housewives. Apple Daily has launched an mobile app incoperating News in Action and text articles, which are easier consumable to general public.
One funny video about Steve Jobs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJSFFpDuGZU
A video feeds is more favourable to general users who have already relied on Facebook to fetch daily information.
According to Hong Kong Facebook page statistics, Apple Daily is the top media page http://www.socialbakers.com/statistics/facebook/pages/total/hong-kong/
But Apple Daily mostly focus on entertainment, and its strong political stands against Central government has posed biased feeling to audience.
So, one unmet customer need here is the need to have another credential news reading sources with similar user experience
Launching to the Asia-Pacific region still poses a lot of questions marks
The cost structure awaits more time and effort to study. As I cannot get access to the Wibbitz here in Hong Kong. There is also doubts on the effectiveness of ai production to compete against the video made by professional personnel. As far as I know, Wibbitz charges the users only based on the usage of video, more views more fee. No charge incurred when the video is generated. Also, Wibbitz plays Ad before the video begins. So, The news webpage can still make a profit when using the service of Wibbitz.
Considering implementation, there is actually technical problem. Currently the Wibbitz service is only applicable to English written test, not to Chinese text.
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