AI automation for publishers and broadcasters
Transcripts, highlight generation, SEO metadata, translations for media operators at scale. Built by the engineer behind Cuez's 10x API speedup. $3,000/mo.
Who this is for
Publisher or broadcaster digital lead where transcripts, highlights, SEO metadata, and translations are manual and slow.
The pain today
- Transcription is expensive and slow through human-only services
- Highlight generation from long content takes editor time
- SEO metadata at scale is inconsistent across content
- Translation limits international distribution
- Manual content ops cost keeps rising as content volume grows
The outcome you get
- AI automations for media ops on $3,000/mo retainer
- Transcription and highlight pipelines automated
- SEO metadata generation at scale with human review
- Multilingual translation for international distribution
- Cost-controlled content ops that scale without proportional staff
Where AI quietly pays back in media ops
Four places deliver clear ROI. Transcription — audio and video content transcribed via OpenAI Whisper or AssemblyAI at a fraction of human cost. Editor reviews for sensitive content. Highlight generation — LLM identifies key moments from transcripts, drafts highlight clips or pullquotes. Producer reviews. SEO metadata — titles, meta descriptions, tags drafted for every piece of content. Editor reviews before publish. Translation — content translated to target languages for international distribution. Translator reviews where quality matters.
Transcription plus highlight-generation pipelines
Pipeline: new content arrives → transcription via Whisper or AssemblyAI → LLM extracts highlights, summary, key quotes, and moments → editor reviews in CMS → published with full metadata. For podcasts, highlight clips shareable to social. For broadcast, key-moment timestamps for producer use. For video content, auto-generated chapter markers. Typical cost: $0.01 to $0.10 per minute of content transcribed and processed. For publishers with 50+ hours of content weekly, this scales cost-effectively against human-only ops.
SEO metadata and translation at scale
SEO metadata — titles, descriptions, alt tags, schema — drafted for every content piece. Editors review and refine. For publishers with high content volume, this cuts SEO-ops time 70 to 90 percent while improving consistency. Translation — content translated to target markets (Spanish for US Hispanic audience, Portuguese for Brazilian market, whatever your strategy). Human translator reviews for quality-critical content; machine-only for lower-stakes content. Over months, quality baselines improve with consistent review.
Pricing and engagement model
$3,000/mo retainer. Covers AI integration, prompt engineering, pipeline setup, CMS integration, monitoring. 14-day money-back guarantee. Cancel anytime. 100 percent code ownership under Work Made for Hire. LLM and transcription costs pass through — typically $200 to $2,000/month depending on content volume. For publishers with very high volume (10+ hours of video daily), cost optimisation is significant part of the monthly work.
Case: Cuez and Instill
Cuez: broadcast-SaaS API from 3s to 300ms, 10x faster, ~40 percent infra cost reduction. Stack: Laravel, Vue.js, TypeScript, AWS, FFMPEG. Broadcast-SaaS performance and pipeline work transfers directly to media AI automation. Instill: self-initiated AI skills platform with structured-prompt library (30+ users, 1,000+ skills saved). Patterns for content-heavy AI work. Together, they cover the media AI territory — performance discipline on pipelines plus structured prompts for editorial work.
When a media-SaaS (Descript, Riverside AI) is enough
For smaller publishers or podcasters under 20 hours of content per month, tools like Descript or Riverside AI handle transcription and basic editing for $20 to $50/month. Custom AI retainer pays back when content volume justifies it (50+ hours per month) and custom workflow integration matters. My target media clients are publishers and broadcasters with real content volume or specific workflow needs the platforms cannot cover. For smaller operators, platform tools are usually the right call.
Recent proof
A comparable engagement, delivered and documented.
Rescued a slow API that was blocking user growth
Refactored the backend architecture, making the system far more responsive and scalable for the growing user base.
Frequently asked questions
The questions prospects ask before they book.
- How accurate is AI transcription?
- OpenAI Whisper and AssemblyAI both achieve 90%+ accuracy on clean English audio, dropping to 80 to 85 percent on noisy audio or accented English. For other major languages, accuracy is similar on clean audio. For sensitive content (medical, legal, technical), human review on transcripts remains important. For general content (podcasts, broadcast news), AI transcription is production-quality with light editing. Multi-speaker diarisation accuracy varies; manual speaker-labelling sometimes required.
- What languages for translation?
- Major languages (Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Chinese) produce translation-grade output from top LLMs. For publication-quality in these languages, human translator review remains important. For lower-stakes content (internal distribution, less-critical markets), AI-only translation is workable. Minor languages have lower quality and require more review. I help decide which languages get AI-only flow vs AI-drafted-human-reviewed.
- How much does it cost per hour of content?
- Transcription: $0.01 to $0.03 per minute (Whisper via API). Highlight and summary generation: $0.10 to $1.00 per hour of content. SEO metadata: $0.05 to $0.20 per content piece. Translation: $2 to $10 per 1,000 words. For a publisher producing 100 hours of content monthly, full AI ops cost typically $500 to $2,000/month on top of retainer. Cost efficient vs human-only ops at any meaningful scale.
- Can you integrate with our CMS?
- Yes. WordPress, Contentful, Sanity, Arc XP, Brightspot, custom CMSs — all integrate via API. AI outputs land in the CMS as drafts for editor review. Metadata populates directly into the CMS fields. Transcripts attach to video or audio records. For CMS with weak APIs, middleware or database-level integration. Integration is 2 to 4 weeks during engagement start.
- What about copyright for AI content?
- AI-generated content (summaries, translations, metadata) is generally copyrightable when there is meaningful human creative input — editor review and editing usually qualifies. Pure AI-generated text without human editing has uncertain copyright status under current US law. For content central to the publication's value, human editorial involvement is both a quality and a legal safeguard. For operational content (metadata, tags), AI-only is typically fine. Consult your IP counsel for specific cases.
Ready to start?
Tell me what you need in 60 seconds. Tailored proposal in your inbox within 6 hours.