Video

Spotify’s video podcast publishing tools expand to creators worldwide • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 15, 2022Posted in Apps, Media & Entertainment, podcasts, Spotify, streaming, Video, video podcastsNo Comments

Spotify today is expanding its video podcasting capabilities to creators in more than 180 markets worldwide, which means the functionality is now available in nearly all the markets where Spotify’s podcast creation software, Anchor, is currently available. The feature, first entered wider testing last year, then officially launched in April to a handful of key markets, including the U.S., before rolling out to half a dozen more countries this summer, including parts of Europe. The move puts Spotify in closer competition with YouTube, where video podcasts have been growing in popularity. Last year, YouTube hired a podcast executive, Kai Chuk, to lead its efforts in the space and was said to be been offering cash to popular podcasters to film their shows, Bloomberg reported. This August, YouTube took another big step into this space with the launch of a dedicated podcasts homepage in the U.S. Meanwhile, though Spotify is happy to talk about the expansion of its video recording functionality, the company wouldn’t share any sort of metrics about the traction its video podcasts are seeing — either in terms of creation or viewership. Instead, the company only responded to our inquiries by saying it’s “excited about the growth” as the format is adopted. So far, the adoption of video podcasts on Spotify has included both Spotify Originals and other, independent shows, like “Call Her Daddy,” which became a Spotify exclusive in July 2021, plus “Diary of a CEO,” and the “Always Sunny Podcast,” among others. Spotify also couldn’t confirm if its video podcasts have managed to increase the time users spent directly watching the shows on their phone or laptop, for example. However, the company did note that creators don’t necessarily have to switch to video entirely to leverage the new format. Rather, they can choose to diversify their content types by publishing some visual episodes alongside their traditional audio podcasts. For example, the episode “An Abortion Story” from “Call Her Daddy,” encouraged listeners to pull out their device at various parts to watch the video. With today’s expansion, Spotify says video podcasters can now use Anchor’s tools to reach Spotify’s audience of 456 million monthly listeners, while listeners can take advantage of features like the ability to switch between watching the video and playing the video in the background. Notably, background play is a feature YouTube charges for through its YouTube Premium subscription. But on Spotify, it’s available to all users — including non-subscribers — for free. If Spotify’s video podcast market share grows, this could become a competitive advantage. Spotify has been heavily focusing on podcasting, video and non-video alike, after spending more than $1 billion on podcast-related acquisitions. During the company’s 2022 investor day event, CEO Daniel Ek said that while the company is still in investment mode for podcasts, it believes the vertical has the potential for a 40-50% gross margin. The video feature is not without its challenges, however. Reports this fall indicated Spotify creators were using the podcast tool to illegally pirate movies. Several TikTok videos at the time showed the problem in action. Spotify said it uses technology to discover and remove this sort of infringing content. Piracy isn’t a problem limited to Spotify, of course. In fact, TikTok’s own LIVE feature is often used for finding a movie to watch, as users live stream directly from their TVs. Previously, Spotify had rolled out video podcast publishing to Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Brazil, Mexico, the U.S., U.K., Ireland, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. It’s now available to most of Anchor’s markets, including Sweden, Netherlands, and regions like SEA (Indonesia), MENA (UAE, Saudi), LATAM (Chile, Argentina, Colombia) and others.

AI-powered media editing app Descript lands fresh cash from OpenAI • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 15, 2022Posted in Descript, media, Media & Entertainment, OpenAI Startup Fund, podcasts, Robotics & AI, Startups, VideoNo Comments

Descript, the audio and video editing platform founded in 2017 by former Groupon CEO Andrew Mason, has raised $50 million in a Series C round led by the OpenAI Startup Fund, a tranche through which OpenAI and its partners, including Microsoft, are investing in early-stage companies. Descript is the second startup to receive a cash infusion from the fund after AI note-taking app Mem, and Mason says it reflects OpenAI’s belief in the future of Descript’s AI-powered features. “I founded Descript with the idea of building a simple, intuitive, fully-powered editing tool for video and audio — an editing tool built for the age of AI,” Mason told ZebethMedia in an email interview. “We’re on the verge of a generational change in the way we create content — fueled by AI. That includes the kind of tools like creators are already using in Descript, and emerging stuff like generative AI. The challenge for companies like ours is how to make that technology useful and accessible.” Mason wouldn’t reveal Descript’s valuation post-money, but he noted that the funding — which also had participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Redpoint Ventures, Spark Capital and ex-Y Combinator partner Daniel Gross — brings the company’s total raised to $100 million. According to a report from The Information in October, OpenAI had agreed to lead funding valuing Descript at around $550 million, over double the startup’s valuation as of January 2021 ($260 million). “We started the OpenAI Startup Fund to accelerate the impact companies building on powerful AI will have on the world, and we’re particularly excited about tools that empower people creatively,” OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap, who manages the OpenAI Startup Fund, said in a press release. “It’s clear from using Descript and talking to customers that Descript is breaking down barriers between idea and creation by extending video editing capabilities to an entirely new class of creators.” Descript was created as a spin-off of Mason’s audio-guide business Detour, which Bose acquired in 2018. The platform, geared toward podcasters and videographers unfamiliar with professional-level editing tools, lets users create instant transcriptions of audio and video that can then be cut and paired with music, photos and other content using drag-and-drop tools. Coinciding with the new cash, Descript today unveiled a host of editing features — some powered by AI — and a redesign intended to make editing video “as easy as editing a doc or slides,” in Mason’s words. That might be overpromising a bit. But the new capabilities do indeed streamline aspects of content creation that have historically been arduous. For example, Descript now offers a background removal feature that lets users put their videos in any setting they want. And with write mode, users can edit scripts in Descript, tapping the platform’s Overdub voice cloning tech to scratch a voiceover. Descript’s redesigned editing interface, rolling out today, which adds features like templates and background removal for video. Image Credits: Descript Other highlights in the latest release of Descript, called Descript Storyboard, include multitrack screen recording — the recorder is now integrated into the editor, with separate tracks for screen and camera — and free access to stock sound effects, videos, images and music tracks. Descript also now provides new video transitions and animations and various templates, including layouts, titles sequences and social clips, along with the ability to create custom project templates. With the redesign, Mason says that the goal was to both complement and augment Descript’s transcript-based editor while leaving core functionality intact. A new experience called Scenes allows users to break scripts composed in write mode into scenes and then arrange the visuals they same way they’d work with slides in a deck. Scenes keeps voiceovers from Overdub aligned with the script, letting creators swap a scratch clip with the final recording, for example, without having to worry about the tracks falling out of alignment. “We believe video should be in every communicator’s toolkit, as ubiquitous as docs and slides. The tools are the only things preventing that, and we intend to change it,” Mason said. “We think of our main competition as non-editors — people who aren’t making video because the tools are too complex and time consuming.” Descript isn’t the only company competing in the audiovisual content editing space. Besides incumbents like Adobe, there are startups such as Reduct.Video, which uses AI, natural language processing and other tech to automatically create editable transcripts. San Francisco-based Descript, which employs about 100 people, has been aggressively expanding, however, acquiring AI company Lyrebird in 2019 to power its Overdub feature. Initially focused on audio editing, Descript launched its first video editing features two years ago, chasing after a digital video market that’s estimated to be worth more than $20 billion. The strategy appears to be working for Descript so far, which counted NPR, VICE, The Washington Post and The New York Times among its customers as of 2021. While Mason wouldn’t answer questions about revenue, he says that Descript’s client base has expanded in recent months to “major universities and nonprofits,” as well as organizations in the public sector. “The pandemic changed the way we all create and collaborate — a lot of people cooped up at home got more curious about video, and a lot of people started exploring the creator economy,” Mason said. “Companies started using video for more of their async communications. Around the same time, individual creators stopped respecting the boundaries between media; YouTubers started podcasts, podcasters flocked to TikTok and so on. Our new funding, plus the fact that all those things I just mentioned are only gaining energy, puts us in a great position to weather any headwinds.”

YouTube begins rolling out Shorts on TV globally starting today • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 7, 2022Posted in Apps, Media & Entertainment, short-form video, shorts, TikTok, Video, YouTube TVNo Comments

YouTube is expanding the reach of its TikTok competitor, YouTube Shorts, with today’s announcement that it will begin rolling out Shorts on TV to its global users. The company’s updated smart TV app will now allow users to view the popular vertical videos in an optimized experience that’s designed to feel more consistent with what users see on mobile, YouTube explains. This was a challenge given that YouTube Shorts, like TikTok, were largely meant to be watched on smaller smartphone screens. The new Shorts-watching feature will require a smart TV from 2019 or later, a newer gaming console or a streaming device, YouTube says. The videos themselves can be found on new Shorts shelf on the homepage of the YouTube app or on a creator’s channel page. In a blog post, the company detailed the different design experiments it researched in coming up with the final concept for Shorts on TV. It found Shorts videos didn’t look great in the YouTube app’s conventional video player, which had too much black space on either side of the vertical video. It also considered a “jukebox” style format which would line up three Shorts side-by-side to take full advantage of the TV’s screen without leaving any additional space on the sides. But this experience was not only cluttered, it also deviated from how Shorts are meant to be viewed — one-by-one. The design YouTube landed on is a customized option that attempts to better fill in the sides of the video with a color-sampled blurred background and an outline around the video that resembles a smartphone’s screen. It then further iterated on this format to add more functionality off to the side of the video, including information about the creator, the sound used in the video, and thumbs-up and down buttons. This information can be displayed by clicking the right button on your remote. In this initial rollout, viewers can subscribe to a creator’s channel in addition to liking or disliking the video after viewing. The company plans to introduce more community features over time, it says. When watching Shorts, you can also use the remote to start or stop the video from playing by clicking directly on the short or by using the Play and Pause buttons on the remote control itself. The Short will continue to play until you advance to the next Short using your remote. You can use the up and down buttons on the remote to move to the next video or return to a prior Short, YouTube says. The company noted it was unusual for consumers to prefer to use the remote control to move through the Shorts videos, as typically watching videos on TV is more of a lean-back experience. But in this case, it found that viewers wanted to manually control which Short played or which they skipped, as they would on mobile. While today YouTube Shorts are watched by over 1.5 billion logged-in users every month, there hasn’t been a way to watch them on the big screen until now as the YouTube app hasn’t allowed users to cast Shorts to their TV and the main TV app didn’t support Shorts viewing. The expansion of Shorts to TV will help YouTube to better challenge TikTok, which had also rolled out its own TV app to various platforms last year, including Amazon Fire TV, Google TV, Android TV OS and select LG and Samsung Smart TVs in North America. TikTok had also offered a TV app for Google TV and Android TV in the U.K., France and Germany, and on Samsung TVs in the U.K. But unlike TikTok’s TV app, YouTube’s TV app has the advantage of being pre-installed on many smart TV platforms. And its rollout is global. However, users won’t necessarily gain immediate access to the feature today as these sorts of rollouts take time. The company says all users should gain the ability to view Shorts in the “coming weeks.”

Pinterest partners with record labels to bring popular music to its TikTok rival, ‘Idea Pins’ • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 19, 2022Posted in Apps, Music, Pinterest, record label, TikTok, VideoNo Comments

Pinterest’s TikTok competitor is gaining new music. The company announced today its video-focused “Idea Pins” feature will now include the ability to add popular tracks from top artists, thanks to new licensing deals with Warner Music Group, Warner Chappell Music, Merlin and BMG. This will expand upon the music already provided through Pinterest’s royalty-free music library from 7Digital, the company noted. With the launch, Pinterest says there will be thousands of new tracks available from artists like Dan + Shay, Bruno Mars, Michael Bublé, Twenty One Pilots, Zach Bryan, Paramore, and others. To make it easier to browse and access this larger music catalog, the Pinterest mobile app will also introduce a new music experience on iOS and Android. Here, creators will be able to search for music by artist, track name or keyword in order to find the right song to accompany their Idea Pin. To use the feature, creators will first open Idea Pins, then click on the music icon to be taken to the screen where they can search and add their desired track. They’ll then record their Idea Pin and publish it. The update could help to make Pinterest’s Idea Pins a more viable competitor to TikTok as well as other social apps that have ventured into the short-form video format, like Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts — all of which already include the ability to add popular songs from major labels. Launched last year, Idea Pins are Pinterest’s own unique take on the now ubiquitous TikTok short video format, which has shown up in numerous apps including Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Spotify, Netflix, and most recently, Twitter. Instead of copying TikTok directly, as some others have done, the 60-second Idea Pins allow creators to tell their stories using a combination of video, images, music, and other editing tools — but in a way where the Pins themselves can be tapped through, which is similar to Stories. The Idea Pins feed, meanwhile, is scrolled through vertically, like TikTok. This format can be useful for the types of videos Pinterest creators would want to make as it allows them to add elements to their Pins that a video-only feature wouldn’t as easily permit — like a list of ingredients and steps for a recipe, for example, or the names of products used in a makeup tutorial. Pinterest users can like, share and comment on the Idea Pins. But they can also save them to different boards for later reference — an organizational feature TikTok today lacks. This summer, Pinterest opened up the Idea Pins format to advertisers, too, with the launch of “Idea Ads.” “Music plays a vital role in elevating storytelling and empowering storytellers, creators and Pinners who inspire the world every day on Pinterest,” said Malik Ducard, Pinterest’s Chief Content Officer, in a statement about the launch. “We are thrilled to partner with Warner Music Group, Warner Chappell Music, Merlin and BMG to bring the latest music tracks to our platform and elevate the content and inspiration created on Pinterest.”