Time Inc. has an ambitious goal for 2016 — creating 40,000 pieces of video content. Today it’s announcing a partnership with Wochit, which should make it easier for the media company to hit that target.
Wochit is a New York City-headquartered startup that’s supposed to make it easier for online publishers to create short videos. To do that, Wochit analyzes the text of an article and automatically finds licensed photos, videos and graphics that can be used to build a video around that story. Publishers can quickly edit the video and add things like background music and voiceover.
For a smaller publisher, Wochit might be the platform that allows it to publish any videos at all. But for a large company like Time Inc., it’s more about complementing existing production capabilities — editorial teams can use Wochit to create videos quickly and affordably in situations where it might not otherwise be doable.
Time Inc. says 21 of its brands (including Entertainment Weekly, Fortune, People and Time itself) have already tried out Wochit as part of a pilot program. For example, it was used to create the video accompanying this EW story about star Ellen Pompeo signing a new deal to stay with the TV show Grey’s Anatomy.
“Partnering with Wochit gives us a powerful tool to further accelerate the volume of our real-time video productions, which we can integrate at the deepest levels across our sites and social channels,” said Brendan Fong, Time Inc.’s vice president of business development, in the partnership release.
Other Wochit customers include The New York Daily News, USA Today and AOL (which owns TechCrunch).
Update: An earlier version of this post incorrectly identified some of Wochit’s content providers as customers.
