The move comes a couple of weeks after SPH announced a major corporate restructuring
SPH Media Fund, the corporate venture arm of Singapore Press Holdings (SPH), one of the city-state’s two major media conglomerates, has participated in the US$13 million investment into the New York-based video creation platform Wochit, as announced today.
The investment comes just weeks after SPH announced it will reduce its staff by about 400 people over the next two years, merge its My Paper and The New Paper properties and shift towards “making several changes to its existing portfolio, to refresh and rationalise its suite of products.”
Other investors were German media giant ProSiebenSat.1, Italian industrialist Carlo De Benedetti and institutional investors Redpoint, Marker LLC and Cedar Fund.
The money will be used by Wochit to develop its technology and further expand the business.
Also Read: Rakuten leads US$10.5M Series B in AI startup ViSenze
SPH is already a Wochit customer, and it had been using the platform to create videos for The Straits Times, Lianhe Zaobao, The Business Times, AsiaOne and Stomp.
Wochit actively targets media and news organisations as its primary clientele, pitching itself as a quick and easy means to create videos at an affordable price.
The idea is the videos can be easily transferred through the cloud across multiple platforms and distributions channels, so one video has a more cost-efficient reach. It also has licensing agreements with AP, Bloomberg, Reuters, Getty and others, creating a library that would have just about anything a journalist could desire.
Notable clients include Time Inc., USA Today and Televisa and, of course, ProSiebenSat.1 and SPH.
“The proliferation of content platforms has resulted in an incredible demand for video. With Wochit, ProSiebenSat.1 is able to produce video content at the scale needed to address this growing need, even providing tools to help deliver that content in the right format for each distribution channel,” said Jens Doka, Chief Product Officer, ProSiebenSat.1 Digital in a statement.
Also Read: Fintech startups: Final call to participate in Finspire 2016’s FREE event!
In September, SPH Media Fund participated in the US$10.5 million Series B round of Singaporean AI startup ViSenze.
—-
The post Singapore Press Holdings invests in platform that helps journalists make videos extremely quickly appeared first on e27.