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After leaving my job I founded Television.ai. I looked at the market, what is required and just started hacking and getting feedback from the market.Olcay Buyan, CEO and Founder Television.ai
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Life gets better for editors with Television.aiOlcay Buyan, Television.ai
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Invest-in-Hessen
This show was made possible by Hessen Trade and Invest with their brand Invest-in-Hessen. You can learn more about them here (https://www.invest-in-hessen.com/). We also run a dedicated sub-podcast with all interviews and news in cooperation with them. Find it all here:
The Founder
In this interview, we talk to Olcay Buyan, (https://www.linkedin.com/in/olcaybuyan/) CEO and Founder of Television.ai (https://www.television.ai/). He has vast experience in media, including Axel Springer (owner of e.g. the German newspaper Die Welt, finanzen.net, Business Insider, Immowelt, Stepstone), as well as other publishing houses and TV stations. He stuck with the technical side of product development.
The Startup
Television.ai helps with ai to generate automatic trailers or short spots for tv programs, independent productions, and much more. Learn more here:
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Venture Capital Funding
The company is looking to close Series A funding towards the end of 2021.
The Video Interview is set to go live on Tuesday, April 6th, 2021 at 17.00 CET in Frankfurt / Paris / Zurich / Milano
The Audio Interview
The Audio Podcast will be published at the same time.
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The Interviewer
This interview was conducted by Jörn “Joe” Menninger, startup scout, founder, and host of Startuprad.io. Reach out to him:LinkedInTwitterEmail
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Transcript
Intro
[0:00] Music.
[0:08] That I owe you were podcast and YouTube blog covering the German.
[0:14] With News interviews and Live Events and welcome everybody this is Joe from celebrated are all your startup podcast in Q2 block from Germany as well as the world’s firstinternet radio station dedicated to startups and Techcompanies if you haven’t already done so make sure to hit the like And subscribe button and if you’re feeling good today leave us a nice comment we always read,all of them that said today I do have a guest from the TV industry from the startup television AI hey I’ll Chi are you doing.I’m fine thank you for having me,totally my pleasure we may tell the people out there that you do have some experience in your pastwith media companies I’ve been stalking you a little bit on the LinkedIn and down here in the show notes wherever you watching this or listening to this there will be a link.Cue our blog post and in our blog post there are the show notes.
[1:19] And there you’ll find the link to his LinkedIn profile and I found there for exampleAxel Springer a big mediacooperation here in Germany also an active startup investor bunker digital also a publishing house I would say usually newspapers as well as the tech company Ericksoncan you tell us a little bit about your life and how it brought to you,to today your position as CEO and founder of Television Ai and then we get into what you guys are actually doing there,
Olcay, The Founder
[1:56] sure yeah so born in Istanbul grew up in Frankfort but all my professional life I worked for international media companies.
[2:06] Like I said Extra Spring this one obviously has many.You know properties in from publishing to online media to television Etc.And then moved on to funker where I was also in a similar field basically,always on the technical side of things engineering product development technical topics basically.And last but not least I was working at Ericsson you know also the technical side of things.In the field of products and Technical topics they are also well.Where I had the pleasure to also work with a lot of like media companies all around the world North America across Europe Etc.
The Start Of Television.Ai
[2:52] And when I left yeah I will want to I wanted to explore more this the site of.The TV and media business where you can make decisions and also be creative Based on data.
[3:08] And so that’s how the whole journey with television I start so then basically found the company and.Looked at the market what’s required and start hacking and building and getting feedback from the from the market,that’s a rather uncommon story for startupradio doubt so far apparently this year all thestartup founding stories involve in one way or another a bar a beer or wineand secondly there is also usually the case that people bump during their professional life into problem and they want to solve thatwith the startup was it the same for you.Right so you could say that the problem was came in a different shape so I saw when I was working in the media companies.
The Problem Television.Ai Is Solving
[3:57] That a lot of big new players especially from North America entering the European market,they would come very well equipped when it comes to technology you know machine learning computer vision to make their decisions on what to produce,what should be you know what should a company look like even produced trailer cetera like look at Netflix,making even the creative decisions largely on data points extracted using machine learning and computer vision models.
[4:26] And then combining that with the power of you know human.Into intuition and to make great decisions amplifying human capabilities basically and and I always want that in wanted that also in Europe and didn’t see that much of course there are exceptions of course.
[4:45] But I wanted to contribute to that basically and he would say the problem there was really I want to see that to be you know be present in Europe and I didn’t see that and while I was working across Europe with all these different broadcasters and.Publishers and.That was the main like the reason why I thought maybe it makes sense to build something where we could be the one you know helping these broadcasters.
[5:11] And that’s the origin basically after mission area that we want to have be one little part of one sort that would contribute to that transformation.And help these broadcasts and Publishers to make the same type of.
[5:24] Decisions based on data as you know supporting their creative teams and operations and data and content teams,with these great tools leveraging machine learning and computer vision to make even better content decisions basically,I see and we may add that today’s video is sponsored by investing hessen since you guys are headquartered here in Frankfort for many people may sound a little bit strange but actually there is a bigseen here in Frankfurt rhein-main area of companies working with,TV radio of video productions many people may know the dragons from Game of Thrones this was made,Pixelmon do also a company originating from the Rhine mine area still with offices in Frankfurt but now spread across the world.So you guys are doing are helping television stations to play AI is that what you guys are doing.Exactly and and what we also do is we just don’t you know we just don’t want to be like another day I company in the media scene.What we want is and that was also the one of the things I wrote down in the beginning was that if we don’t find.
[6:46] A recent as you know specific use cases where we can help these companies tend to literally I doesn’t deserve to exist basically it has to die then.And but then we found I would say last year.These Niche use cases where we can actually be very pragmatic and have concrete examples of problems or pain points that we can help with.
[7:09] And they’re like three or four of them one being you know,creating automatically you know the motion thumbnails for your gallery the automatically trailers where you don’t have high profile trailers right so if you look at video streaming offers.On the market of course there’s great Blockbusters and they have trailers production companies have the money to put into,the production of promotion material but then you’ve also content like I don’t know documentary is about certain Niche content you know which I’d have.Yeah you know might have you know a hundred thousand viewers or something like that and,they say you know where should we put the money for the promotion content and it might not end up on these Niche products.
[7:54] So what we want to do is there for example to in order to ensure a great user experience for all the audience not just those that are interested in the high block bus you know the Blockbusters and what have you,we want to say okay for those you have a trailer but for the other ones you will might be able to leverage machine learning with a mission to give you a great substitute,that looks good enough and sometimes times something is even great that works great in your product and you resolve the issue of having this bias of,the great content gets all the promotional content great key arts and trailers and what have you and then the niche product where you hope we have maybe like,I’m not a hundred thousand viewers or something doesn’t deserve to get the promotion material at the end so what we do is,hey let’s spend a little bit of money and automate them and have a great substitute there and then what at what ends up happening is that across the across your product if you want to whatever you want to watch you can provide the same experience,they will always be a trillion will always be like great thumbnail Etc you know that’s the that’s the gold there.
[8:57] I am trying to think how I would describe you guys one option would be you are helping with optimization small budget Productions to look professional,in terms of like trailers thumbnails and so on and the other one would be a more businesslike description that you guys are helping,the long tail of the video on video production to look professional to apply AI there.
[9:31] Would you agree with both yeah I think yeah I think that’s fair enough but what I usually say is that we provide an AI powered video editing the cloud so,and we help you then with these specific cases where,it’s a lot of like you know manual work or where it’s not justified to put the money in for all the video editing,that’s where we help you basically so like I said we provide you with an automated way of creating motion thumbnails automate trailers.And also with news Clips with just the recent finding is where we help.
[10:05] Publisher some broadcasters to create these news Clips you’ve probably seen them them on TV or online media 60 to 90 seconds there is a voice explaining reading out some news and then.Suitable to the topic and the things mentioned in the audio voice over you see the right pictures you know if they talk about the production of or distribution of covid vaccine you might see some.Laboratories filling up the packages and what have you and what we do is basically instead of someone sitting down for two hours to find in a material find the scene cutting it so that,at the moment when the the voiceover speaks about a certain topic the right pictures scene.
[10:46] That takes maybe two hours that’s a or three hours to create a clip and we can do that in like 5 to 10 minutes or even less you know.Because we look at the video automatically every frame or every audio wave Etc,and we look at the article that has been written we create a synthetic voice basically and then,suitable to what the voice is actually talking about narrating then we find the right momentand from hours of material with the find this those 60 seconds of material that fits well basically I do believe many people who have been charged with those tasks,are now happy they don’t have to do that anymore on the other hand that also,lets me to think about is there already something like a channel out there for example on YouTube that does this almost fully automatically,right so that that’s actually one of the great things that we see is that we the editors are very happy with that right so,
How Television.Ai Helps News Stations
[11:45] imagine let me just describe you this Persona imagine there is a young editor writing the article and typically at these Publishers what they do is they write the article and it’s great and the content is.
[11:57] Amazing but it’s text form and you the problem is that when you are published that text basically.You know people that you are less likely to be discovered on Google and Bing and what have you,people only read the article and that’s it but if you have pictures and especially videos,it’s much more intense much more engagement people are you know staying on the website longer it’s great for you at into a furry at numbers and all that right because bad people spend more time on your website.When reading the article and also you are you know,you get the benefits also that Google and Bing and all these aggregators will find you much more likely and position you on top basically because you are much richer in terms of the content basically.
[12:39] And doing creating these videos it’s often not you know not a wise decision because you never know will the article actually bring enough views and AD views and clicks and what have you,in order to justify the cost to produce that two-minute clip.But if you drop the price to 10 percent of the original cost then it’s a no-brainer because that the cost is so low and and the great thing also on top is that the person writing the article can now also create the video.You don’t need to bother your colleagues toward crate you want to actually create the great videos and not your 60-second video for your article instead you can do it right away without even having the expertise in video editing.
[13:23] And then for the for the editor-in-chief it’s great because the staff is now import create videos while the big in the past they were only creating the text.
[13:32] And it was always for the editor-in-chief a risky back because if I have to 3,000 Euros per day to create videos which of my article should actually get to meet you,now we’ve Collision your eye you can just say you know the cost goes so much down I can create a video for all the content basically so it’s not the risky bet anymore that means you enable,stations like with full-time new staff to flood basically the internet with their video content,right exactly so they can take the material they already have the articles that are already writing for the newscast and what have you read what it might even create new articles but.The final thing is that you can now you have totally different much more powerful tool set where you can create.All these videos without the additional overhead of money and communication and team and what have you instead people writing these articles can novels create the video.So yeah that sounds pretty interesting are you right now limited like in terms of,cooperation Partners to Europe to Germany or can any radio or TV station whatever reach out to you globally yeah you can reach out globally we support I think it’s over 70 languages.
[14:58] And so you can and then also the visual components are not limited to language so a car looks like a car in Germany the same way it looks in in the US.We even had some very interesting pocs in India and I remember this one.Prospect from Texas who runs a rodeo Channel.And they were quite happy with the results but the problem was that it was more like a staff thing that they said it’s not the right time but they were super interested,that we were able to create trailers and clips for the rodeo Channel you know,so that was so it’s not limited please just reach out to us and we can arrange something.
The Startup — Scaling With A Tiny Staff Base
[15:41] I’m talking a little bit about television AI the company itself how many guys are you right now.It’s super small it’s basically just depending on how you count it’s two two and a half people super small.
[15:56] We leverage a lot of like open source projects and there’s a pragmatic.
[16:02] The initial funding was my own money basically so we didn’t receive any funding so far.The only thing we do is we have a corporate we have a work with Microsoft as part of their startup program basically.Which gives us access to technical advice and resources in the cloud.And then we also in the at the moment in the program of the media lab in Munich basically.Which is yet gives great access to the industry in Munich right.
[16:37] Maybe some of your listeners don’t know outside of Germany is dead or if you’re not in the field obviously how should you know,but a large part of the media industry all these public broadcasters and pay-tv Stage stations and private broadcasters,are actually based in Munich or at the very least say the sorts of like sky and prisons designs and you know all this.
[17:01] And so it gave us great access to that Network basically so we could leverage those connections and and then test our hypothesis if we actually doing the right thing,and it looks like we’re doing we on the right.Path I would say so we see a lot of like traction from different areas but,I think the product is now finally coming to a point where we have the right stickiness so like I said when Once editors have access to this tool they love it they don’t want to give it back,they want to extend plc’s and they back their colleagues to actually get this software in the workflow in their tool set.So we on track to get there I would say I don’t want to talk too big but we create a clear value for the editor so their life gets better with to visionary,it is a good quote their life of editors gets better with television AI,that pretty much sounds like you are on the on the step to start real scaling there are you currently looking for external investors,
Looking Possibly For Investors
[18:05] right so like I said in the beginning the in the funding was my own money and and we want to do first is we want the stickiness before we scale.
[18:15] Because having you know millions of Euros in the beginning doesn’t help you if the product is not sticky.But if you if you’ll get later the money and you have sticky product then the money will multiply your reach quite nicely.And so at the moment we’re not looking for money but I think in the next three to six months there will be serious steps to.Reach out to our Network we already talking to some of the yeah investigators say.Across the globe but we always tell them like we’re not looking for money right now but but you know we want to be like establish a network of found a of investors that once we decide to seriously look for money and.That we would then reach out to them but if there’s someone in the audience is interested to talk to us please feel free to reach out.So that would be super interesting because at some point our customer acquisition cost will go up and so at that point like it is for all these be to be sus companies your your customer acquisition cost will go up.
[19:15] And the money that you need to to get your customers or prospects in the funnel and then push them through the funnel so at some point you will need money up front,I see that sounds like a serious a closing end of this year beginning of next year see.We’ll see I ha so okay it was just a pleasure having you here on startupradio.All the best for you and everybody who’s drawn in by the trailer of this video we can tell them that we made it with your tool thank you very muchgreatly appreciated and best of luck and let us know when you race your funding will do it was pleasure.
[19:59] My pleasure if you are a professional looking at the European startup scene Germany is a place you cannot miss.
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[20:17] Most likely you have never heard or read anything only startups before in English but you will in the future be ahead of the curve And subscribe to.
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