Google Experiments Automatic Video Creation from a Web Page

Google introduced URL2Video, a research prototype pipeline to automatically convert a web page into a short video, given temporal and visual constraints provided by the content owner. URL2Video extracts assets (text, images, or videos) and their design styles (including fonts, colors, graphical layouts, and hierarchy) from HTML sources and organizes the visual assets into a sequence of shots, while maintaining a look-and-feel similar to the source page. Given a user-specified aspect ratio and duration, it then renders the repurposed materials into a video that is ideal for product and service advertising.

Assume a user provides an URL to a web page that illustrates their business. The URL2Video pipeline automatically selects key content from the page and decides the temporal and visual presentation of each asset, based on a set of heuristics derived from an interview study with designers who were familiar with web design and video ad creation. These designer-informed heuristics capture common video editing styles, including content hierarchy, constraining the amount of information in a shot and its time duration, providing consistent color and style for branding, and more. Using this information, the URL2Video pipeline parses a web page, analyzing the content and selecting visually salient text or images while preserving their design styles, which it organizes according to the video specifications provided by the user.

This could make it a lot easier for more businesses to shift into video content - and as every social media platform says, repeatedly, video content is the best performing content type online.

• Video is the best performing content type on Facebook
• Tweets with video see 10x more engagement than those without - and Promoted Tweets with videos save more than 50% on cost-per-engagement
• LinkedIn users are 20x more likely to share a video on the platform than any other type of post
• Pinterest users are 2.6x more likely to make a purchase after viewing brand video content on the platform

Video is also, increasingly, how younger users are engaging, through Stories, and now TikTok clips, which points to this becoming even more of an expectation for brand communications in future.

It's not publicly available yet, but Google's URL2Video process could provide another avenue on this front. Facebook actually provides similar, with its Video Creation Kit, which it launched back in 2018.