Maker of video and podcast recording tools Riverside gives its users a new way to reach their audience: newsletters.
However, Riverside isn’t aiming to directly take on established newsletter platforms like Mailchimp, Substack, Beehiiv, or Ghost. Instead, recognizing that its user base already produces a lot of content, the company is giving users of its recording tools an AI tool to turn existing videos and podcasts into newsletters and send them directly from its app. Users can also create and send newsletters from scratch without using the AI conversion feature.
“Substack and Beehiiv start you with a blank page. But our creators and business customers are already producing rich, information-dense spoken content in 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 from scratch in a separate tool, we’re helping them turn news content into much less effort,” he told TechCrunch co-founder and CEO of Riverside, Nadav Keyson;
The company is also updating its recording suite to support multi-camera recording setups. It also gives users the ability to add remote guests to recordings.
The update also brings new AI features. Users can use AI to design a first cut of a recording once 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 chat video podcasts, that it says can improve the lighting, depth and sharpness of recordings.
Riverside, which has raised over $60 million in funding, joins a number of platforms trying to get into alternative publishing to either diversify or expand their revenue streams. For example, Substack in March launched an integrated recording studio that directly competes with Riverside, and in April, newsletter platform Beehiiv also ventured into podcasting. In June, social network Mastodon said it would allow users to publish their posts as newsletters.
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