Scaling Video Production with Content Reuse

Scott Abel: Hello, and welcome to Scaling Video Production with Content Reuse. You’re here today to check out this webinar. We have a panel discussion about how structured content can help you create content videos quickly and effortlessly. And in this particular show, we’ll be using some medical content videos as examples. My name is Scott Abel, the Content Wrangler, and I’ll be the host of today’s show.

Let me review a few things with you. First, I don’t want you to have to be concerned at all about your camera or your microphone, because we can’t see or hear you. We don’t have any access to your controls. Those are all yours. You can rest assured you’re watching your video in private. Also, if you’d like to ask a question of the panelists at any time, you can click the Ask a Question tab located underneath your webinar viewing panel to open a text-based window that will allow you to text a question to the presenters. Know that they and myself are not able to text you back. So if you’ve got a question or a comment, definitely do not hesitate. And if you’re in full screen mode, watching the entire show and taking up your entire screen, know that you may have to come out of full screen mode to participate in some of these activities, like asking a question.

Also, there’s some additional content available in the attachments section of your webinar viewing panel. Clicking the ‘attachments’ and ‘links’ button will open up a document repository where you can find additional information, including troubleshooting for the BrightTalk platform, contact information for each of our presenters, and some resources provided by the presenters and the sponsor of today’s show. So definitely check out that area anytime during today’s broadcast and you may be asked to answer a poll, and if so, we’ll queue you up and we’ll tell you what to do. It’ll be a multiple choice situation there. At the end of the show, I’ll ask you to provide a rating and some feedback based on the quality of the presentation using our five star rating system, in which five stars is an excellent rating. I know the presenters love feedback, so if you do want to share some feedback, please do so using the feedback form on the ‘rate this’ button. And I know they’ll appreciate any kind of feedback that you give them, so please do. I’m encouraging you to do that. All right, without further ado, let’s welcome our first presenter. Andrea, are you on the line?

Andrea Citta: Yes I am, Scott. Good morning everyone.

Scott Abel: Thank you for joining us. Could you tell our audience members, maybe I’m familiar with you, a little bit about yourself, what you do for a living, and your connection to today’s show.

Andrea Citta: I am an operations manager at Paligo. Paligo is a cloud-based CCMS platform. I do a lot of different things. I wear many different hats, and I enjoy working with our customers.

Scott: Excellent. Thank you for that. Could you clarify one thing for audience members who might not know what a CCMS is?

Andrea: Okay, a CCMS, is a component content management system, which is basically a tool for authoring, content management, versioning, and releasing technical documentation. It’s a really good solution, especially for authoring complex and multidimensional technical documentation.

Scott: Thank you for that. I appreciate it. I’m going to bring in the next two of your panelists so that we can welcome each one of them, and then I’ll allow you, gentlemen, to provide the presentation, and I’ll sit in the background for that. Wouter, are you on the line? Can you hear me?

Wouter Maagdenberg: Yes, I am. Hi, Scott. Welcome, everybody.

Scott: Excellent. So nice to have you back. You’ve definitely been here before and done a few shows for us. We appreciate you introducing us to the concept of automated video production, but for the viewers who might not know who you are and what you do, could you talk a little bit about that and your connection to today’s topic?

Wouter: Yeah, definitely Scott. Again, my name is Wouter and I work at a company called TXTOMedia. And what we actually do is, we tie into the solution of Paligo to CCMS and content that is curated over there. And that is something that we use to create and turn into videos. So we use structured content as a basis to turn it into videos. And that’s, of course, the main topic of today.

Scott: Thank you for that. All right, and our third panelist, let’s see Rob, are you on the line? Hi, how are you?

Rob Neeter: I’m fine, thank you.

Scott: You are sounding loud and clear. The technology gods are on our side today, apparently. And as a crusader for viable healthcare solutions and the co-founder and CEO of CareAnimations, tell us a little bit about your job, what you do, and your connection to today’s topic.

Rob: Yeah. Thanks, Scott. Hello, everyone. I’m Rob Neeter. I am a medical doctor by profession, but around 30 years ago, I saw my last patient, in real life, if you will. CareAnimation was founded in 2016 as a company where we are providing, or we are developing and producing, animated videos with the goal to make complicated health care and medical-related subjects clear to everyone. And we really mean everyone. And with that, we try to contribute in one way or another to healthcare and to the benefit of patients. And I am in this meeting because we are using the fantastic technologies of the other two guys and their companies in providing the videos, in making the videos that we provide to our customers. So I’m very happy to be here.

Scott: As a human being who’s also a patient in a healthcare setting, many times during my life, I appreciate your willingness to take the knowledge that you have as a medical practitioner and apply it to the business world where we can maybe do some better communication for patients out there. And I know that these videos can definitely help with that.

For the viewers who are watching the show who just joined us, just a quick note here. There’s a poll open that you can participate in if you’re not in full screen mode. If you are, you’ll have to come out of full screen mode, that asks, do you or your team create informational videos for your customers? If you would like to participate in that poll, here’s a little multiple choice answer selection, five choices, click one, and that will give your answer to the presenters and help them to be able to contextualize their messaging today.

And second, you can ask a question of the presenters at any time by clicking the ‘Ask a Question’ button located underneath your webinar viewing panel. Doing so will open a little chat window into which you can text a message to us. But know that it’s only one way. You can text in, but we can’t text you back. But rest assured, I’ll be queuing up all the questions that are asked and trying to get answers for you after the presentation from our three panelists today. So, without further ado, I’m going to put myself on mute and allow our panelists to drive forward this presentation, in which they’re going to start talking about scaling video production with content reuse. Andrea, are you going to go first?

Andrea: Yeah. Thank you, Scott. I’m going to go first. Basically, guys, thank you all for joining today. It’s going to be very simple. First, we’re going to chat a little bit about the importance of video as a format for your customers. Then I would like to spend just a few minutes to talk a little bit about structured authoring and why structured authoring? It’s important to create video at scale, multilingual video at scale. Then I’m going to hand it over to Wouter, who is going to show us how TXTOMedia turns structured content into video, multilingual video, at scale. And then we’re going to hear from Rob, who’s going to tell us a little bit about his experience of creating informational content in the pharmaceutical care industry. So you already know about the presenters. I just want to start with the first poll. Actually, I know that it’s already been activated for you, so I’m going to ask you to vote on the first poll. Do you or your team create informational videos for your customers today? Just going to give you a few minutes to vote. I can see some of the results coming in.

I’ll just quickly comment on those: 53% of you said yes, regularly, 7% of you said yes for major, occasional, and projects, only 30% said no, but we’re planning to. And then the remaining 7% said no, never. So with this, I would like to ask my friend and colleague Wouter to take us through the next part of the presentation. Wouter?

Wouter: Thank you for the introduction and also, of course, for the polls and people filling it out. Let me start with more division of this. Imagine, about video, because I always know and that’s of course something we hear on a daily basis, all these reasons not to create videos and especially not at scale. But now imagine that those hurdles are not there. What would you do? And the reason I ask you to think about it is because, of course, it’s not only the webinar that we present on structured content and how it’s the basis for creating the videos, but there is also, at the end of the presentation, time for questions. It would be nice if you think about what you would do if there were no hurdles. And how we can help you prevent hurdles to start scaling in your videos. And for instance, one of the reasons to start scaling is, of course, if you need different languages because then the amount of videos starts to multiply.

That’s really, I think, the whole idea of today and how we make this possible. And that’s the how, but the why is something I can of course start talking about and that’s because a lot of you, I assume, create technical documentation, for instance, user manuals, training materials in a written form. And actually that’s the basis between Paligo and us, how we cooperate and how we can actually leverage that existing content. The reason to turn it into a video is because it’s visual media and that’s typical for us as human beings. It’s far easier for us to understand, and also remember, visual information and text information. That is the whole idea behind my company. How you can actually help companies to turn their written materials into visual media. I think this image says a lot about why it’s very relevant to do so. It’s not only for people to understand information better and, of course, to stimulate learning, but also to help you remember the information. When you see how something is done, it’s easier to remember it for later.

And that’s relevant for a learning environment, but that’s also relevant, for instance, for product environments. From both the vision from the consumer, his customer experience going from learning, awareness phases, to buying and boxing, needing support. It’s not only marketing in video anymore, of course, we know these other phases now. The video comes in hand, and that’s typically what you see consumers do. They go online to YouTube, and that’s where they find their answers in the video formats. But you can only be there if you have video formatted.

That’s the relevance of the topic today. And then the ‘imagine question’, all these hurdles when you want to create video in a traditional way. And the other highly skilled people you need, the different teams you need, etc. But also, how it’s financed. That is a project when the money is burned and the video needs an update. It’s hard to do. The video is maybe not compliant with your product information. That’s exactly why today’s webinar is connecting structured content to video creation.

Andrea, you are the guy for the polls today.

Andrea: Yeah I’m the poll guy. Thank you, Wouter. So, the second question here is ‘Are you  using structured content today? Are you in a structured or an unstructured authoring environment with your informational content and technical documentation?’

All right, so we see the answers are coming in. We have provisionally at least 47% with a yes regularly, almost 50% of you are doing structured content today, 21% for some projects only, 26% are planning to in the future, and 5% no, never.

Okay, the next to the next section is the reason we ask this poll, because we wanted to talk a little bit about structured versus and unstructured content And when Rob and Wouter wanted to put this in place, obviously they needed structured content, and so I’m assuming by what I see on the poll results, I’m going to comment briefly on what I think are the four major differences of structured vs. unstructured.

I’ve spoken to a customer prospect a few minutes ago, right before this webinar, and they were telling me that they have four types of machines. They’re in the manufacturing world. They need to document and they need to do different types of manuals, like installation manuals, admin manuals, user manuals. They’re doing it in Word today. And Word is an example of unstructured content. And so, of course, the four types of machines are very similar to one another. They need to copy and paste a lot of content from one Word file to another Word file. And then, of course, there’s multiple versions. There’s multiple languages.

And so when it comes to updating a component that is shared among the three documents or the four machines, it’s chaos. It is absolute chaos. It’s very difficult to update content that is shared across multiple unstructured files or documents.

And so, for me, the four major differences between structured and unstructured are, on the one hand, unstructured is a proprietary format. So that makes future migration problematic, as opposed to structured being based on XML, which is an industry standard and it’s future-proof. In unstructured, you’re working with file-based systems and it’s generally a house of cards.

It’s very problematic to maintain and to manage, to update. On the other hand, structured will deal with databases and servers. And that gives you enterprise-level operational capabilities.

If you have multiple providers in unstructured, they each have different styles, they maybe use different fonts or different sizes, or sometimes to make a title or a chapter, they make it bold, or they increase the size of the fonts. So unstructured content leads to inherent inconsistency, especially when multiple writers are involved. In structured, you have inherent authoring consistency because there are rules that all the authors must abide by and must follow. And so it’s easier. There’s less tweaking when you publish.

Finally, and it’s really important to the topic that we’re addressing today, translation can be very expensive if you’re using an unstructured tool. Whereas, it’s made easy, fast, and most importantly, cost-efficient if you’re using a structured authoring approach.

The other thing that is particularly important for creating localized videos at scale is the componentized nature of the content itself, right? So topic-based authoring. I’m sure that many of you are familiar with topic-based. What it means is the possibility to reuse this topic for each and every one of the three manuals, to continue on the previous example, of the four different machine areas that we need to document. It’s easier to keep topics up to date. I don’t need to open 200, 400 different Word documents to update a component that is being shared across all of these different user guides, administration guides for different products or different versions.

And so updates are faster. They are more cost effective. And you get a very broad to a very narrow type of content reuse. So you can reuse publications, and you can reuse topics, or you can deal with the complexity of multifaceted multi-dimensional technical documentation using variables, using conditional content or filtering. And then you can also reuse a translation, obviously, if you’ve already sent a document out to translate, the translation memories are engraved almost in the XML, right?

We remember what’s already been translated and approved, and that makes it super efficient for any localization scenario or use case. So with this, I’m gonna pass the ball back to Wouter, who is going to tell us a little bit about how structured authoring is enabling the production of videos that scale.

Wouter: Yeah, thank you very much. But before we do…

Andrea: Oh, it is still my turn. I’m sorry, we have another poll.

Wouter: But it’s, of course, quite an interesting question to raise.

Andrea: Yeah. Did you know that structured content can create videos at scale? That’s our next poll. Just going to refresh my poll tab.

Wouter: Well, actually after this webinar, everybody does. So. I’m quite interested to see the results.

Andrea: Yeah. Okay. Results are coming. I see the different percentages here. Wouter, would you like to take us through the next section?

Wouter: Well I think the majority actually didn’t know this, so I think this webinar is, of course, interesting. And let me explain a bit because there are also people, and that’s what I like, who are skeptical.

I see 10 percent of you. So let me explain a little bit on how this all comes together. Andrea, you mentioned the reuse of components, just before, and let me align what we are used to in this world of structured content with components becoming part of a topic and topics becoming part of a book or publication.

And let’s align it with a video. And what a component is for a topic or for a book, the fragment is for a video. And the difference, of course, is that when you read text, you start reading in English from top to bottom, from left to right. And when you watch a video, you more or less start at the beginning of a timeline until the end.

And that’s exactly the process that we take structured content to. We make it from those components into fragments, and from fragments too. Well, in this case, video titles, and that’s also where the reuse of the video components, in other words, the fragments, come in. So that’s what we are going to talk about. And before I’m going to dive in more detail, let me first introduce you to what kind of videos we are talking about.

And we actually have three types, we talk about image-based videos, animated videos. We talk about footage-based videos or live action materials, and we talk about animations. And the last one is exactly what Rob will address later in more detail. Let me dive into: how does this look when you take a written component-based document into a video?

And let me take, at first, the animated video as an example. And later, address the footage-based live action one. And again, Rob, will continue with the animations later.

This is a screenshot of a CCMS, and not just any CCMS; this is Paligo. And it is the system also used by Rob’s team. And here you create the structure of the documents, and we will talk about the leaflets of the medicine later. So you have, of course, the different chapters and then all the different topics that are addressed, that content needs to be written. And when you do so, you end up with something like this. This is, of course, not about medicine. This is about how to charge the battery of the camera in this case.

And what this actually shows us, an order, some structure from top to bottom. It shows us some text, the information, and it aligns in this case with some existing images. I think he mentioned that you can print this on paper or you can save this as a PDF.

But what you can also do is send the same content to our platform and the XML or the data, whatever goes into our system. The first thing that happens is that the text is brought to speech and why is this done?

This is done, indeed, to turn written content into a timeline because of the audio, and the timeline, and what we will talk about it a bit further on as well is, of course, different per language.

But the timeline is important. And when you bring this audio, you can do that, of course, with speech synthesizers or with human voices, that doesn’t really matter. You end up with, at times, a presentation, so to speak, of what you actually see on your screen. And if I show this to you, then you will see that the text is reused, and the images are reused. I’ll play a bit of it.

“Plug the charger in. An exhausted battery will fully charge in about 2 hours and 10 minutes. The charge lamp will flash while the battery charges. When charging is complete, the charge lamp will burn steady.”

I think you’ll get the idea, right? So that was when you 100 percent re-purpose already existing materials. You can easily create an animated video. And what you need, of course, are some visuals, otherwise nothing will appear on screen, of course, and text for timing of your video.

But you can also do, and that’s when I make the switch from the animated video to a live action video is to say, okay, I will still use the structure of this topic – that would be to create videos of a topic, not a whole book at once.

So I’m still talking about the topic, ‘charging the battery’. We still leverage the text to turn into speech. So we still have that timeline. But now we are not going to illustrate the timeline with these existing illustrations, as with animated, but now we are going to replace them for, in this case, live action fragments.

So then the process is that we have that goal sheet in between and there is more or less a working order to create based on the topic. Some live action video fragments filmed for the camera or screen recordings or some computer-generated graphics, and the trick here is to  keep those media assets, as we call them, those fragments clean. There’s no audio to it. There’s no text. There’s no language in the files because we will put it in based on what you wrote in your CCMS solution.

And I will show this to you in a bit in English. But I also will come back now to the localization issue because you have, of course, this topic in your CCMS. You probably also localize it. And then you can re-purpose not only the images from your CCMS with animations. But of course, if the video fragments are clean, no language, you can easily also re-purpose the screen assets and you see they didn’t change. But now the text has changed, because it now becomes Spanish. And that will, of course, make a different timeline because it takes different timing to pronounce the Spanish compared to the English.

So let me now show you those two samples in a bit. So I start with that English live action sample and then I will move it to a Spanish one.

“An exhausted battery will fully charge in about 2 hours and 10 minutes. The charge lamp will flash while the battery charges.”

“Cargue la batería, camera de video. En algunos países o regiones, el cargador puede ser proveído del adaptador conectado.”

I think you get the idea, right? So this was of course a very simple example, but hopefully, going back to imagining, if you map this to your own situation, the existing content, that’s providing the structure. In most cases, it’s already the basis of your audio and the script, so to speak, to create the videos with.

And now you see that the process, but also creating the assets, is actually something that you can automate. This was an animated video. This was a sample again of a simple live action video. Last, but not least, and that’s of course, the main topic of today, we start talking about CareAnimations which is animations. And in this case, it works the same. So there is a topic written, brought to speech, there is a timeline, but now also all the graphics that you see are created in an automated way. Let me take the opportunity to introduce Rob, to explain not only how this works but also why they do it. Rob? Take it away.

Rob Neeter: Thanks Wouter. Hello, everyone. Pleasure to tell you something about who we are and what we do and to show you how structured content can translate into videos, with amazing efficiency.

Just a short introduction to the company. We are based in the Netherlands, founded around five years ago, and what we do is we create a software by which we are distributing patient information in order to change patients’ behavior, change patients knowledge, and to make them better users of care that is being provided to them.

We are now around 40 people, of which the majority is in the Netherlands, but we are also branching out to some other countries. We have a company in India where we produce some of our software, but we are also now starting in other European countries and hopefully also this year across the Atlantic in North America.

The goal is that by the end of 2225, we are approaching 100,000,000 people. We are actually approaching that number of people that we are supporting in one way or the other. And the reason why we want to do this is summarized briefly in this slide coming from an article in the New York Times, where it was stated that the most expensive disease of all diseases is actually the disease of non-adherence of patients not taking their medicines.

Because this lack of adherence in the US alone is responsible for 125,000 deaths, and 10 percent of hospitalizations with around, I mean, depending on how you calculate, 100 to 300,000,000,000 US dollars a year.

And this is not something which is specific for the U.S. This is everywhere in the world, exactly the same problem. Now, here’s just a general finding, but if you would then zoom into people who have limited health literacy, meaning that they are not able to understand or utilize medical information properly, also just that’s a problem. These people, they live on average seven years shorter and 15 years, less in good health. So we are really talking about a big social and health problem.

Now, why do we do what we do? I mean, how we tried to find a solution for this, and we are focusing primarily on medicines. I mean, we also have videos on diseases and whatever you can think of. But the primary focus is on medicines, because if people use their medicines properly, then they are going to be, you know, they help themselves, they help society. Because medicines are without any doubt the most cost-effective means of healthcare, except, of course, for prevention.

However, this is the reason for the devastating figures that in the previous slide, 30 to 50 percent of all these medicines are not used properly or not even used at all. And that is across the board, in the U.S., it’s probably close to 50, and in Europe it’s a little bit lower. But whether it’s 30, 40 or 50, it’s like you’re throwing away half of the groceries that you just picked up from the store, but now you do it with your medicines.

In addition to that, a statistic is that even in the developed world, 30 to 60 percent of people have limited health literacy. And that means that in the Netherlands, for instance, it’s around 33 percent. So three out of 10 adults are not able to understand what a pharmacist or a doctor tells them. So how can these healthcare professionals expect patients to do what they have been instructing them to do?

Now, I’m just coming back to a slide. There’s a lot of literature available that makes visual content much easier to digest. Written content is better understood. It can be reproduced. And it’s also interesting to know that around 90 percent of health information is on paper.

Now, what we are providing, just in one sentence more or less, is an end to end audio-visual support of that pharmaceutical care process by providing a personalized patient information solution where almost all the medicines that are available in a market are being provided with or enriched with a video in any important language that is present in that country. In easy-to-understand language, which is being used, spoken language using interactive video, pictograms, and questionnaires.

And by complimenting this with repetitive or let’s say, messages, medication alerts, gamification to keep people, in one way or the other, engaged with the system, we address around all the barriers to good adherence, and therefore, from a theoretical point of view, you may expect this to be highly effective.

Just to show you a video, just to give you a little bit of an idea of what these videos look like.

“Welcome to BeiPackClip. This video covers the most important information about your medicine so you will know what to do, what to expect, and what to watch out for. Your medicine is called Irbesartan. It’s a so-called vasodilator. Your doctor has given you this medicine because you have high blood pressure. This medicine will relax and widen your blood vessels. This lowers your blood pressure.”

“Is there anything I should watch out for?”

“Yes. Contact your doctor, if you experience diarrhea or lots of vomiting.”

“Is there any food or drink I need to avoid?”

“Yes. Be careful if you’re on a low-salt diet. Talk to your doctor about whether you should continue.”

I guess you’ve got the message. So you’ve seen a video, an animated video with a young male. And that’s also because the video for which this patient… the patient for which this video has been made is a male. He speaks English. He could have been speaking Turkish or German. That is all personalized at the pharmacy or at a doctor’s office, or highly automated also.

And these videos are interactive. They’re very simple for a lot of people. They say they are too simple, but around 10 percent if you do research, for around 10 percent of the population, they are too simple, but these guys can then also reach the more sophisticated materials of course, related to these medicines.

And now some research we have already concluded on this and it definitely seems to work.

And what you see here is a knowledge score before, that’s in the gray, at the left side, and the knowledge score after watching just one video. And then you can see the average on the right hand side with the red line. There’s an average of around a 20 percent increase of knowledge after a video and that’s not directly one minute after the video, that is done standard time of one hour after the video.

And you can see that it is working in both low average and highly educated people. And what is extremely interesting here is that a low educated person after a video ends up with a better knowledge than the average, or highly educated people, before watching the video. So that was quite promising, or that is actually quite promising. And as a result of that, in the Netherlands there are 17,000,000 people. Of course, it’s a small country, but 97 percent of all the pharmacies are distributing this product to their patients.

So what I want to stay with it is – it works. And it works because we are able to produce very standardized videos and we do that. And then I come to the, more or less, to the end of my presentation. I’m trying to explain to you the solution that we are using and why we are using it. The key to scaling is fragments.

I mean, at this moment, or not at this moment any more, but let’s say three months ago, one video was also one fragment. Now with the new technology of Paligo and TXTOMedia, we have completely redone our product development and production process where we are not making videos anymore, but we are making fragments.

And here you see a couple of these fragments. And out of these fragments, a video is being produced, but out of more or less the same fragments or very tiny changes in these fragments, it’s very easy for us to change characters. And not only characters. This is an older male instead of the younger female. But also, an older male gets a different type of information about exactly the same product and medicine as a young female.

I mean, just think about pregnancy. And so we are using fixed fragments, which are the same, always. We are using flexible fragments based upon personas, and we are using variable fragments based upon the medicine itself.

The question of course, …. It looks nice that you can scale it, but is medical and pharmaceutical information scaleable in the first place? And then these points are something that you may also have a look at in your own market. Whether that is also true for you, because then such a process could also have advantages for your company or your business.

In this case, there’s a huge family market and of course all doctors, pharmacies, also in all countries always claim to be different, but actually they have a lot in common. I mean, the U.S. or Germany is definitely different from Holland. But the difference is only in the last one or two percent.

If you look at medicines, the medicine overlap between countries is approximately 60 percent. And that means that if you have done five countries, the overlap is already 90 percent.

So you’ll have, in the sixth country, you only have to make 10 percent of the medicines new. And that number of new-to-produce7 videos reduces with each country.

The same holds true with locally approved medicine information. I mean, between different medicines, the overlap of information is approximately 70 percent. And that means that if you have 5,000 videos made, so that’s a part of the first country’s production, you have approximately 95 percent of all locally approved medicinal information already available to you.

And finally, if you are creating content in at least five markets and using 10 languages altogether, you can already serve 40 percent of the total world population. So if that is the case that there’s so much overlap between products, between countries, between languages, then automatically, you are in a position to structure your content.

And if you do that in a system that is providing you the facilities to put this structure into that content or to structure your content in the first place. And if you add technology, then the conclusion that we ran into was that 90 to 95 percent of our total video production can be fully automated. And at this moment, we are in a position that we can produce, I mean we are 40 people, a really small company, but we are able to produce up to 100 some videos per year. And with the same technology and infrastructure, we are able to scale that further to 200,000.

And then to finalize, I hope that this illustrates a little bit of what we have been experiencing.

We started in 2016. And then we were able to have animators create 40 videos per week and that stayed more or less the same. I mean, our team got a little bit more experienced. From 2021, we have already started to change our way of working. And in 2022, very recently, we have deployed our new technology. The technology with Paligo and TXTOMedia, which at this moment enables us to make 533 animated videos per week by just one animator.

Now, we have to do, on average, 25,000 videos for the country to be able to launch in the country with a good coverage of the medication. So you can imagine that this ability enables us to scale like a rocket at the moment. And that will bring us, hopefully, to what I mentioned earlier, the 100,000,000 or the 95,000,000 patients that we would like to touch and support by the end of 2022.

With this, I want to conclude my presentation and I’m sure that there’s time for any questions to my colleagues or to me. But until then, thank you so much for your attention and interest.

Scott Abel: Excellent. So this is Scott, the host of the show. I’m back on the line here. We are going to take questions from the audience, for audience members who would like to ask a question of our presenters about the automatic generation of video from structured content.

You can do so by clicking the ‘ask a question’ tab located underneath your webinar viewing panel. Doing so opens up a little text-based window into which you can text a question.

Alright. So we’re going to join here now and stop the slides. But all of our presenters will come on the screen live. Hello, now, you get to see everybody on the screen, please one at a time.

Starting with Andrea on the left, say who you are and audience members, if you forget who each of the presenters are, you can hover over their photograph and their name will pop up.

So, Andrea, I know you’re the first on the left, at least on my screen. So I’m hoping it looks the same for everybody. But I have some questions for you.

The audience members are curious about a lot of things. One of the things is voices. They were wondering if any of you could talk to the voices, where did the voices come from? How do they control them? And can they control them? And do they have the right to use them? And if so, can they change them? So basically, what do you know about the voice?

Andrea: I think this is more a question for you, Wouter.

Wouter: I could always try. Yeah. Well, actually there’s a choice to either use human voices, and then we provide a script and you ask somebody to read it, you record it, you put it in the system, and it’s a real-life voice recording. But today, most people, most systems and also our production, tends to use a lot of synthesized voices of different vendors and there are whole collections of them. And I think more than 100 languages are already supported with dozens of different voices per language. And of course, they’re more let’s say U.S. English voices, then maybe Bahasa voices, but still there is always a choice that those are the two options technically.

And the first one, maybe a little bit of a hybrid solution, is to record your own voice and make a synthesizer voice so that’s also possible. And then actually you can have Scott say whatever you like by just typing text and use his synthesized voice. So that’s also possible, and you can tweak these voices – reassemble code it’s called – I won’t go into detail, but you can trim them and adjust them and make them your brand’s voice per language if you like.

Scott: Lovely. And can you talk to us a little bit about the voices that we heard today? What category do they fit in with the example videos that you were showing?Wouter: All of them were synthesizers. And they were all synthesizer voices that you heard today, and they were not really tweaked too much, but you could. But these were quite standard voices.

Scott: Does your system take advantage of the markup language that is there to help control?

Wouter: Yeah, it does. Yeah. So that’s where you can adjust the tone of voice. And also there is where structured content comes in because it’s metadata to text that actually tweaks the way text is pronounced and so that’s number SSML. So go to wiki and SSML and you can read all about it. Or go to one of the founders with all the details but that’s typically how it works.

Scott: So for audience members watching that are creating structured content in XML, this is another XML markup language and this one is designed to help you control the output and how the speakers, the synthesized voice, and correct me if I’m wrong about this, how it behaves. Does it have a slight delay? Do you know the speed at which they deliver the words so that you can try to emulate human behavior?

Wouter: Yeah, exactly. And in some of the languages, you even have specialized voices, for instance, news reading, or reading children’s books. Chinese is great. They actually have a lot of these kinds of voices. But yeah, the different vendors, Google and Microsoft, are the main domain founders of these synthesized voices today.

Scott: Interesting. What are some of the challenges that teams face when they try to introduce the notion – Rob, this might even be a great question for you – of auto-generating videos.

I mean, I have had meetings where I bring up the subject and sometimes people don’t know very much about it. And so they look at you like you’re crazy like, that’s not a thing. And other times people say that might be a thing, but I’m pretty sure it’s bad. Did you have preconceived notions that you had to work with in order to get people on the same page?

Rob: Well, absolutely. That’s been a running gag between Wouter and me for a couple of years now because he visited my office once a couple of years ago, with this fantastic story of auto-generated videos. And my daughter, who was working in the company that day, was sitting there and she watched me. She did not understand anything that Wouter was saying. She told me that I shouldn’t care about that. My understanding would come over time. And it took me, I must say, I mean, there’s no exaggeration in the story. Itt took me nine months of processing to understand what he was presenting or what he had presented to us.

And then, we went back to him and we started to work on all the analysis that needed to be done in order to come to the answer to the question, are we a company? I mean, we are a company that makes a lot of videos, but, can you automate this process? And then we faced, of course, for sometime in parallel to all the analysis that we did. We faced the problem of our animators that got pretty scared that they were helping in the analysis, any analytic work.

They were basically helping to get themselves unemployed. But which is definitely not the case because it makes time for us to do more, let’s say, unstructured videos. I mean, pharmaceutical videos are really well- structured, whereas some videos about diseases just have to be customized. And we are using our highly educated animators now for the customized videos, and we are using it as a process for all the things that we can do in an automated way.

Scott: It makes a lot of sense. It’s all about prioritization. Which things should be prioritized as humans need to be heavily involved in versus, we can automate these things. And I think if you’re making that decision, you’re learning lessons along the way. And speaking of learning lessons, one of our viewers wants to know what lessons have you learned associated with the production of the content? So, for example, creating structured content sometimes leads companies who maybe didn’t go through the motions of having the proper training at first for writing, for reuse, for example. So they’ll have a system that will repurpose these elements. But then when they read the results in content, they’re like, well, it’s a mess. It doesn’t make any sense. And it was because they hadn’t had the proper lessons, right? And so they learn, and sometimes the hard way, that they need to make some tweaks, and then they do that, and it improves the output. Are there lessons that you learned about the existing content after you started to make videos? And you said, wait a minute, if we change the content upfront, our video will be better in the end.

Rob: Yeah. Well, I mean, we definitely went through that cycle. I mean, you know, we have been, our videos have always been structured in a way. But in order to make them so structured that we could use or could divide them into fragments, and then also to standardize these fragments. And that is a process because, you know, if somebody, if you ask somebody to write texts, scripts, they are primarily people with a certain creative background.

And we have been forced, in away,y to push them back into a chute, into a cage. But also there, I mean, you know, if you do not have other work for these people to do, then they will leave your company, which may also be a consequence of it, but the lessons we learned in this is that you have to be very, you have to put quite some emphasis on educating, but also supporting and reassure your employees, your colleagues, that this is not the end of the world. This is going to change the company completely and open new horizons. One additional language, or one additional issue, or learning, is that the enthusiasm to change this, led us to make plans that were unrealistic.

So, I think that we were, we thought that we had approximately… a runway of around 12 months, which was really nicely planned and designed. It took us around 18 months, which is not that bad. But it tells you that we took a real good, we paid a lot of attention to planning and getting it out properly, but still to make such a change takes time. On the other hand, I mean, we are at the moment launching in Germany and France. We are preparing Sweden, we are preparing Spain, and we would also do that without this technology. But then we will do that over a period of two to three or four years. And now we can do it in a matter of months. So, you know, the time that I just mentioned that we lost in our development stage, we have already, you know, got it back multiple times.

Scott: Speaking of multiple times and recuperating what you’ve put into the project. What have you been able to show management to support the notion that they should continue this process and that this is a good idea with a great return on investment?

Wouter: Rob is the management.

Rob: Well, Wouter, you had to convince me once, before that you had to convince me.

Wouter: I think it’s the cakes that I always bring to your office that help. No, but I think, yeah, what you said is true, when we met, of course, it’s a completely different concept and approach to creating video. People always think about creating video titles. But as soon as you reuse, and a lot of companies reuse, it’s not just CareAnimations. It also includes consumer electronic firms or automotive companies that we work for.

And a lot of the topics are the same, have the same cards, which go in, I don’t know how many printers. So the processes are quite equal, but maybe it looks different, but the text is the same. All the images are the same, but different languages.

So there’s a lot of reuse going on at all these companies. So if you start looking at video that way and also the reuse of video in the different stages of the consumer lifecycle, and maybe you present it to create awareness in marketing. But at the end of the day, you can reuse the same assets in support videos. That’s typically what I see in consumer brands.

Then, of course, it’s not only about cost and time. Or maybe it’s not only about cost in a lot of these cases. It’s about time-to-market of the content to be able to release the products on the market. And I think those are also what I hear Rob saying when he says, okay, we are launching these various countries. We can do that far quicker. Yeah, the sooner you have your product on the market, the quicker you can start making money with it, right? So I don’t think it’s a cost thing. In a lot of cases it’s also a turnover thing.

Scott: Excellent. Well, I’m afraid we’re running out of time right now. That’s the end of the show. So I was going to thank the audience members for participating and asking questions, and all three of you for joining us today.

And I would like to encourage the audience to learn a little bit more about all the companies that are on today’s show and the services they offer. You can check in the attachment section of your webinar viewing panel for information about that, or you can contact our sponsor today, in fact, Paligo, which we’ll talk about for just a minute here.

So let me tell you a little bit about Paligo. They’re an all-in-one, cloud-based component content management system that has everything you need in one tool. There’s authoring, content management, versioning, branching, release workflows, publishing, translation management, and more. And it’s updated continuously because it’s in the cloud. So you don’t have to worry about locally installed software or some kind of cumbersome deployment. Paligo uses a robust XML source format that ensures proper structure consistency in unparalleled flexibility for processing content in multiple ways.

True structured authoring ensures your content’s longevity over time. And if you need that,and you’d like to learn more about the services offered in the product, the cloud-based CCMS, you can point your web browser to Paligo.net, or go to the attachment section of your webinar viewing panel where you can download content provided by Paligo.

I would like to thank our presenters today, Andrea, for joining us, and also Wouter, and Rob, all three of you. We really appreciate your time today and your expertise and sharing. Thanks for doing that. And audience members, I’d like to encourage you to be on the lookout for upcoming shows. In fact, tomorrow we’ll be talking with Deb Bosley and Diana Lorianni on the need for plain language and strategies for using it. That show will be brought to you by XML press. Following that, March 30th, Ann Rockley will have a guest on her show, the Essential Mindset.

The guest will be CJ Walker. She’s gonna talk about upskilling and how you can adjust your mindset and your skills so that you’re available and marketable in the new workplaces that are being developed based on all these technological changes that we’re seeing. And March 31st,

we’re going to have a great show. It’s a discussion with Patrick Bozeck, and myself with Jeff Johnson, who is an interface design expert. We’re going to be talking about his research into understanding that reading is unnatural. Jeff is going to help us understand that reading is the artificial skill that we learned by systematic construction and practice, like playing the violin or juggling. We’re going to discuss how humans read the role of context and the impact of poor information design. It’s going to be a great show. It’s going to have some science-based solutions that you can put into practice immediately. So you probably don’t want to miss that show.

Thanks for joining us today. My name is Scott Able, the Content Wrangler. I’ve been the host of your show today. I hope that you’ve enjoyed Scaling Video Production with Content Reuse brought to you by Paligo and CareAnimations and TXTOMedia. We really appreciate you joining us. As always, I wish you well and just keep doing great work. If you’ve got an idea for a future show and you’d like to share it, don’t forget that you can send me an email at Scott at the Content Wrangler, dot com. And if you would do me one favor and give a rating to our presenters today, let them know how they did using the five star rating system on the way out the door.

That would be great. Thanks for joining us and we’ll see you at an upcoming webinar. Have a great day. Bye, everybody.