Video and podcast recording tool maker Riverside is giving its users a new way to reach their audiences: newsletters.
Riverside isn’t aiming to directly take on established newsletter platforms like Mailchimp, Substack, Beehiiv, or Ghost, however. Instead, recognizing that its userbase already generates a lot of content, the company is giving the users of its recording tools an AI tool to turn their existing videos and podcasts into newsletters, and send them directly from within its app. Users can also create and send newsletters from scratch without using the AI conversion feature.
“Substack and Beehiiv start you at a blank page. But our creators and business customers are already producing rich, information-dense spoken content on Riverside. For most people, speaking is easier and more natural than writing from scratch, and the ideas are already there, in the conversation. So instead of asking them to start over in a separate tool, we help them turn a recording they’ve already made into newsletter-ready content with far less effort,” Riverside’s co-founder and CEO Nadav Keyson told TechCrunch.
The company is also updating its recording suite to support multi-camera recording setups. It’s also giving users the ability to add remote guests to recordings.
The update brings new AI features as well. Users can use AI to draft a first cut of a recording as soon as it’s finished, and the assistant can also create hooks and content for various social media platforms. The company is also adding an AI video enhancement feature, trained on conversational video podcasts, that it says can improve lighting, depth, and sharpness of recordings.
Riverside, which has raised over $60 million in funding, joins a host of platforms that have been trying to enter alternative publishing avenues to either diversify or expand their revenue streams. For instance, Substack in March launched a built-in recording studio that competes directly with Riverside, and in April, newsletter platform Beehiiv ventured into podcasting as well. In June, social network Mastodon said that it will allow users to publish their posts as newsletters.
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