Robots, Video and the News

A South Korean startup called Shakr is automating video news production for the web.

To do so, they run a semantic analysis of top news stories, send out bots to gather images and publicly available video about the story, send out another bot to gather text to be read by an automated voice, mash it all together and boom, a video’s produced on the topic.

The company says it can do it almost in realtime.

Via ReadWriteWeb:

Shakr is lead by David Lee, an entrepreneur we wrote about first for his work on video chat platform Tinychat. Lee says the new company has raised seed funding and has already secured a deal with Tatter Media, a large South Korean blog syndicate. Shakr will automatically produce video versions of that company’s bloggers text, in near real time. A consumer-facing app will also allow end users to create multi-media shows out of their home media assets.

“For writers the transition to video is lucrative but extremely expensive on the front-end,” Lee says. “We will help bloggers and small online news sites compete with the powerhouses of online content by turning out video even faster than the big boys do.”

A network of “little guys” all participating with the most powerful parts of their computers will enable Shakr to create news video automatically, faster than Fox News or CNN. That’s the company’s aim - but there’s no need to stop at news, either.

If this sounds vaguely familiar, you might remember that the StatSheet sports network is written by robots. 

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