Viz Story: Creating videos for the modern audience

There are currently over 2 billion users on social networks[1], 41 percent of these use Facebook as their primary news source[2]. And the trend is upwards.

How can publishers thrive in this new environment where so much content is consumed in the new media sphere? While we may not have all the answers it is clear that publishers need better tools to create and deliver their stories to a broader audience easier and faster than they currently do.

Worldwide internet access, smartphone, and social media usage

Journalism, storytelling techniques and the means of delivering a narrative have been evolving at an amazing speed. If you were to say in 2006 that in a few years, most people would get their news first on their phone, and that in ten years more than a billion people will use one single online service (Facebook) as their news provider - it would have been considered ridiculous.

The use of video on online video sites and social media platforms has exploded and the traditional attributes of videos have changed dramatically in recent years. There are new but established trends. First, square and portrait videos are displacing the traditional landscape format. Also, videos on platforms such as Facebook, twitter and content consumed by users are expected to tell a narrative without sound where text and graphics are used for captioning. A new genre of videos has emerged, sometimes called Captioned Video that have more or less advanced textual narratives as an overlay to the video.

Until now, it has not been easy to meet the technical and creative requirements for this new video genre. Most technologies available today are limiting storytellers ability to create great video stories and are inadequate in addressing the new challenges of publishing their stories to multiple social media platforms in multiple aspects. And even where publishers manage, their workflows is too difficult and time-consuming.

The most common problems for video content creators

Video production teams with enough resources and skillsets are able to produce and publish large quantities of videos, visually rich by using text narratives and graphics - but most teams do not have these capabilities and are limited to basic video editing. It is more crucial than ever to be the first with breaking news or articles with potential for picking up traction and momentum online. - the first one to publish a story will often get the most attention and click-throughs .

There has been a sharp increase in videos posted on publishers' main Facebook pages. Now the major publishers rely heavily on publishing native video to their main Facebook pages, and the audience is responding to it. Also, from January to October 2016 BBC News, Channel 4 News, CNN, Fox News, Mic, National Geographic, NBC News, The Guardian and Vox saw a close to 600% increase in engagements on their video posts.

With Viz Story, we enable storytellers to create a high-quality video story with Visuals on Video narratives (Text on Video, Graphics on Video and Images on Video) within minutes. We want to remove the technological barriers that impede the creative process of telling a story and getting it published.

Video storytelling should be fast, easy and fun. We are all becoming storytellers: Video with text, graphics and images used as a means to convey a narrative will continue to be a key part of storytelling and journalism in the years to come.

With Viz Story we aim to create a tool that makes it so, and allows for easy publication and sharing to any platform, everywhere at once.

References:1: Statista.com: Number of worldwide social network users

2: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, Digital News Report 2015, Statista.com

3: Newswhip: Here's how big Facebok video is getting

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LINK:	http://www.vizrt.com/news/newsgrid/51624/Viz_Story_Creating_videos_for...
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