ROBOTS NOW EDITING NEWS VIDEOS

TV News editors may become the latest workers to be threatened by automation. The technology website AllThingsD.com reported on Wednesday that an Israeli startup called Wochit has the ability to read news copy and quickly grab news stills, graphics and videos and produce a video news clip based on that copy. Humans become involved only when the clip is scanned by a producer checking for accuracy and when the voiceover copy is recorded. The entire process reportedly can take as little as ten minutes. On its website, Wochit says that it currently averages 458 news videos daily and predicts that in the future, “News will not be created by a few select taste-makers but instead by endless sources with multiple points of view.” AllThingsD columnist Peter Kafka commented: “No one’s going to mistake this stuff for a 60 Minutes report. But, depending on the use case, it may certainly be good enough. Wochit is aimed at Web video … but in the not-so-distant future, I can see this stuff working on conventional TV, too.”