On 29 October 2020, Google announced that it is testing out a new process that will allow brands to create videos from static website content. This will make it easier for brands to produce their own video content.
This new process is called URL2Video. This process will extract static assets from a website and use them for an animation. This is what Google had to say:
“We introduce URL2Video, a research prototype pipeline to automatically convert a web page into a short video, given temporal and visual constraints provided by the content owner. URL2Video extracts assets (text, images, or videos) and their design styles (including fonts, colors, graphical layouts, and hierarchy) from HTML sources and organizes the visual assets into a sequence of shots, while maintaining a look-and-feel similar to the source page. Given a user-specified aspect ratio and duration, it then renders the repurposed materials into a video that is ideal for product and service advertising.”
URL2Video will make automatic editing decisions based on the content it extracts from the website. As video is the most effective form of content on the Internet, it makes sense that Google would help businesses across the web make the shift to video.
Google hopes to further develop this technology to support audio in video editing. This is what they had to say: “All in all, we envision a future where creators focus on making high-level decisions and an ML model interactively suggests detailed temporal and graphical edits for a final video creation on multiple platforms.”
Implications for Marketers:
Marketers can expand their knowledge on video content with this new tool and help the brands they work with transition to producing more video content. As video is becoming more prominent across the web, this new technology might just be the key to propelling brands’ creation of video content to more effectively market their businesses.
References: https://ai.googleblog.com/2020/10/experimenting-with-automatic-video.html
