A reading room for video
Any video can be read instead of watched — in the words of the people who made it.
A twenty-minute video takes twenty minutes, however little of it you need. Text can be skimmed, reread, searched and read on the train with the sound off. The video doesn't go anywhere: it stays next to the text, and the facts in it open the video at their own second.
What's inside an article
- The author's voice. The text is written the way the author would have written it: their “I”, their words, their doubts. A channel hosted by two speaks as “we”; in an interview the guest speaks in their own words.
- Frames from the video. The pictures are taken at the seconds the text is talking about — not a cover and not stock photos.
- Facts lead to their second. A dotted underline opens the video at the moment it was said — in a small window over the page, so you don't lose your place.
- Chapters, like on YouTube. The strip at the bottom is split into the article's chapters: the knob follows your reading, and a click on a chapter scrolls the text to it.
It isn't a summary
A retelling in the third person turns the authors into characters in someone else's note — that's what summarizers do, and there are plenty of them. The third person is left for videos where nobody from the channel speaks: a recorded panel, someone else's talk, voices from the street.
Nothing is made up for people who said nothing. A video without speech gets a photo report made of its frames, not an invented story, and a song gets no article at all. Sponsor reads are cut out.
Who it's for
Readers. Reading is free and needs no sign-in. An article comes out in the language of the video, whatever language the site is in.
Authors. An article about your video is written in your voice, so it's yours: you can take it, rewrite it or hide it. What authors get →
For now, new articles are made by invitation. Everything already made is open to everyone.
Questions, ideas, an article that came out wrong — write to hi@storiteca.com.