Schibsted Open-Sources AI Tool to Streamline Digital News Video Production

Norwegian media conglomerate Schibsted has released its internally developed artificial intelligence tool, Videofy, as an open-source foundation model on GitHub. This action, occurring in March 2026, is intended to democratize advanced news production technology, offering particular benefit to smaller newsrooms with limited in-house development capacity. Videofy was originally created within Schibsted to automate and accelerate the creation of short-form news videos optimized for digital platforms and public screens, formats that are increasingly central to audience engagement.

The system's primary function involves an automated workflow: it ingests a published article, generates a corresponding script, selects pertinent visual assets such as images and video clips, produces a voiceover track, and assembles the final video package. This process is strictly integrated within a mandatory editorial review structure, ensuring that human oversight remains the final determinant. Before its public release, the technology had already been used to generate thousands of videos across Schibsted's operations, including within the VG newsroom where the tool was first developed prior to wider group adoption.

Juan Carlos Lopez Calvet, Director of Data & AI Platform at Schibsted, has championed this open sharing, framing the release as an invitation for industry-wide collaboration. He stated that open-sourcing enables the broader media sector to advance superior solutions more rapidly than any single organization could achieve independently. Calvet also stressed the necessity of embedding robust editorial control mechanisms and maintaining transparency to uphold core journalistic principles amid the rise of generative AI.

Schibsted's decision to release Videofy as an open-source foundation model is rooted in lowering innovation barriers and increasing transparency regarding AI's function in journalism. The company explicitly maintains that AI should serve as an enhancement to the existing workforce, not a replacement, thereby necessitating a human-in-the-loop approach for accountability. This initiative follows earlier demonstrations, such as Lopez Calvet presenting Videofy in early 2026 at the 'Voices – European Festival of Journalism and Media Freedom' in Florence, where its capability to convert an article into a finished video news item within minutes was showcased.

This move positions Schibsted as an active contributor to industry infrastructure, moving beyond theoretical discussions about media transformation. The company welcomes practical testing and feedback from global publishers and developers, viewing the GitHub repository as a starting point for collective refinement. The prior method of creating these short video summaries was a resource-intensive task performed continuously throughout the day, a process now substantially automated by Videofy's AI-driven assembly.