How Oovvuu's AI saves news media from the duopoly, and kills fake news

Breaking news is like cold fusion. Perpetual, free, vast and popular. Nothing stops it. Not weather, not war, not politics or financial meltdowns, not disease nor famine. In fact, the opposite, they drive it. It is endless, dynamic and self-replenishing - and that's why Oovvuu mines it.

Our mission is to embed quality video in every news article in the world via a global partnership of broadcasters and publishers, supported by artificial intelligence. The outcome is to tell reliable news to a billion people, combat the scourge of fake news and repatriate billions of dollars from Facebook and Google back to the journalists who uncover the news that keeps us safe.

The opportunity has been a long time coming, but is now possible due to an explosion of news consumption, soaring video viewing and the arrival of practical, affordable AI.

Now, when a big story breaks, Oovvuu can source a broadcast quality video and embed it in a matching news article, anywhere in the world, in the blink of an eye.

It's a big vision, so how did we get here?

January 2009; a plane ditches in The Hudson river in New York. In Australia, media company Fairfax, publisher of The Sydney Morning Herald, is innovating strongly in video. It has 22 producers creating 1,000 news clips a month. Half of all online Australians are watching and it is the envy of publishers worldwide, but the success is costly. Losses are in the millions, and pressure is mounting. Into the maelstrom, Fairfax hires some of the Oovvuu team to turn it around.

Analysis soon reveals that 80 per cent of video revenue is coming from just 30 per cent of the videos. Niche, vanity projects are soaking up unjustifiable sums, while the real money is being made from video related to breaking news, and that needed to be the focus.

By the time the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico a year later, the change in focus had reigned in costs and Fairfax video was at break-even, but a new challenge was emerging.

Video's soaring popularity had caused a glut of advertising inventory, and commoditisation was leading advertisers and agencies to demand publishers drop ad prices. With the video budget at break even, that would put the business back into loss. What was to be done?

As the war in Syria erupted in 2011, I executed an unusual clause I had added to my contract. It said that once short form video was at break even, I could test a niggling hypothesis: If millions watched a short video with one pre-roll ad, maybe many of them would also watch a longer video, even if it had multiple ads.

My journalistic instincts told me that people would invest their time if the quality was good enough, and publishing full documentaries would enable Fairfax to tell the biggest stories in greater and unprecedented depth. Soon after, we launched a long form video hub called smh.tv (named after Sydney Morning Herald). In the process, Fairfax became the first news website in the world to offer a video on demand network.

Making quality long form programming was beyond us, so we set about acquiring it from broadcasters. It began a roller-coaster three years, signing rights deals with the great broadcasters, including The BBC, Bloomberg, ITV, EndemolShine, Fremantle, Vice and more.

Within a year, we had 2,000 programs and were streaming daily across a dozen devices including mobiles, tablets and connected TVs.

More content, more viewers and more devices meant data poured in and we began to gain incredible insights into our audience.

• People watched an average of 3.2 documentaries each per month.
• Even at their work desk, they would watch for an average of 11 minutes.
• At lunchtime, mobile viewing spiked at 16 minutes.
• The longest viewing durations were on parenting and military history content.
• Viewing tended to be three minutes longer if the video featured CGI.

Yet one thing remained constant; most viewing and most money was derived from factual, documentary and current affairs programming, if it was contextual to the constant cycle of breaking news.

Soon, smh.tv was generating seven figures in advertising revenue but most critically, it was profitable. While long form represented only 20 per cent of total viewing, it delivered 100 per cent of the profit. Short form only broke even.

As the world began to wake up to the potential of video, sharks began to circle. Facebook and Google began befriending publishers and using their size and market power, combined with their DFP ad server, to syphon data away and manipulate the video ad market to their own ends.

We were perfectly placed to see this, and watch the noose tighten on publishers, and we had a model that drove publisher profitability. We decided it was time to pivot and scale.

Our first move was to create Oovvuu, and with the support of global publishers and broadcasters, we began to globalise the model.

We also pivoted the way we embedded videos, by inserting the long form videos directly into articles. The logic was that more people would watch videos in situ than if they had to click elsewhere to watch.

In the process, Oovvuu made News Corp the first online news outlet to enhance article pages with long form video on an industrial scale; our second world first.

This gave us access to larger and larger audiences, and that attracted more broadcasters including Al Jazeera, ITV, The Press Association, TechCrunch, VPRO and many more. Soon we were building a consortium.

Expansion continued. More videos flowed into the network, more viewers drove greater viewing, embedding in articles drove day time viewing, long form hubs drove viewing in the evenings and at weekends.

Getting videos into articles though remained manual. An editor would scan the homepages, find the videos and embed them. Oovvuu partnered with the online video platforms most publishers use, Ooyala and Brightcove, to accelerate integration.

Within six months, article embeds were generating revenue at twice the pace of hubs, and all these new streams were profitable for the publishers.

Millions of viewers, interested in hundreds of thousands of topics, were watching thousands of videos daily in hundreds of articles, delivering millions of ads and every viewer interaction was providing deeper insights.

Who would have guessed that the most profitable videos 2016 would be long form shows about global warming, prostitution, methamphetamine abuse, 9/11, shark attacks, serial killers and MH370. And the common theme through them all was the natural breaking news cycle.

Oovvuu discovered all this in the data, and found a need to pivot again. This time it was transformational.

By 2016, publishing had become a game of scale. In a bid to catch the helter-skelter growth of Facebook and Google, every major news brand was publishing a vast number of articles. Only a few were their own, but many more were coming from syndicated feeds and through content-sharing partnerships with other publishers. At News Corp, the number was roughly 2,000 articles and article updates an hour.

A human editor working flat out could only embed 40 videos in articles per day, but Oovvuu suspected the opportunity was far greater. We wrote code to read our customers' output, and to check it against our broadcaster videos to see how many matches were possible. We discovered we had relevant videos for as many as 500 video embeds per day - 12x as many.

We began crunching code to find an efficient solution to do the matching, and as we delved deeper into the challenge, we accidentally created an AI. Within days, it was clear we had built something revolutionary, and with its scale, it was global in impact and relevance.

We could now deliver any video, to any article, anywhere in the world, without any staff costs, in less than a second. It was a solution to a $20 billion global problem, and soon our breakthrough appeared on the radar of some big players.

First to arrive was IBM, with funding and support. We gained access to the Watson AI, and we now use it to read articles from 100,000 publishers in real time.

Weeks later, Amazon added Oovvuu to their Activate program with Airbnb and Slack, and provided more funding so we could move the world's video into the cloud and deliver it instantly.

Intrigued, Facebook joined our advisory board.

By 2017, Brexit and Trump were dominating the headlines and Oovvuu was going global. Breaking news had never been so vibrant, nor video production so active.

We added another partner, Google's YouTube, and began distributing news, factual and documentary programming with ads to 143 countries, gaining a clear view of global video monetisation.

All the while, we kept our service free for publishers and broadcasters, and earned all our money from revenue shares.

Oovvuu's service was mind-blowingly powerful, yet free, with the never-ending cycle of breaking news at its core, and the AI doing the heavy-lifting.

With Watson, Amazon, Oovvuu's tech and the world's publishers and broadcasters on board, we were tracking 26 million topics every day, and monetising video to a global audience in a way that was profitable for all.

As we enter 2018, video consumption is at an all-time high, but again the market is in danger of being subverted by Facebook and Google. The duopoly has hoovered up as much as 90 per cent of the global video ad market.

Recent changes such as Google and Apple disabling autoplay in articles, and disabling certain ad types via the browser, have landed heavy blows on publishers, collapsing video views by as much as 85 per cent on quality news brands. People are being denied the news. Publishers are suffocating. Broadcasters know they are next.

But with great power comes great responsibility and the duopoly has fallen on its face. Facebook has fallen foul of fake news, despite the warnings. It has been caught flat-footed, and left looking dangerously inept. Weeks later, it announces it's exiting the news business.

Google catches the contagion, and admits its AI cannot handle all the user generated video on its platform. The result is that billions of dollars of advertisers head for the door.

Oovvuu has always held firmly to four core principles. Fake news and brand safety issues make it more important than ever that a bigger, stronger consortium of publishers and broadcasters work together to ensure that a billion people get the news and information they need and can trust, and advertisers can align their brands with brands that have a century or more of authenticity.

Oovvuu's journey, and that of its staff, is far from being over. Today, like everyday, feels like just another beginning. Let us know if we can help you.

Ricky Sutton is the founder and CEO of Oovvuu. He can be contacted via www.oovvuu.com or e-mail him at [email protected]