Shakr Automatically Creates Video Snippets For News Stories As They Break


You run a news outlet. A big news story has broken, and you need a video now. Even if you’ve got a dedicated video staff, the research, editing, and encoding on the video is going to take at least an hour. By the time you’ve got it all exported and uploaded, it’s anything but breaking news.

Disrupt Beijing Battlefield competitor Shakr (not to be confused with the Disrupt SF 2011 champ and digital discoteca Shaker) aims to lop out all of that manual labor and wasted time. By algorithmically pulling in information, photos, and video snippets from around the web, Shakr automatically creates video clips as the news breaks.

When a news story hits, Shakr begins parsing web articles for details as they’re written. Simultaneously, it’s digging around the web for related images and videos. The news publisher hops into Shakr’s editing tool, confirms the details of the story they wish to highlight and the photos they want to include, then taps the finish button. When the final product comes out of the oven, it’s complete with synthesized voice narration and incredibly snazzy visual transitions.

Shakr’s videos are built on WebGL. While that limits platform compatibility for the time being, it (at least theoretically) works out to nigh-universal compatibility as more browsers find their WebGL wings.

While Shakr’s primary distribution channel will be through media partners (with ads strapped on as the business model), Shakr will also launch a web video portal of their own (pictured in the gallery below).

We’ll add a video of this segment (complete with a example of one of Shakr’s auto-built videos) to this post shortly. Sadly, we’ve gotta do all of that aforementioned encoding/uploading stuff first. (Update: Added! See above.)

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