The creators of the video and podcast recording tool Riverside are introducing a novel method for users to connect with their audiences: newsletters.

However, Riverside isn’t directly competing with established newsletter services like Mailchimp, Substack, Beehiiv, or Ghost. Instead, understanding that its userbase is already producing a significant amount of content, the company is providing its recording tool users with an AI solution to transform their existing videos and podcasts into newsletters, allowing them to send these directly from the application. Additionally, users can compose and dispatch newsletters from the ground up without utilizing the AI conversion feature.

“While platforms like Substack and Beehiiv present a blank slate, our creators and business clients are already generating rich, information-laden spoken content on Riverside. For many individuals, speaking comes more effortlessly and naturally than crafting text from scratch, and the concepts are already embedded within the conversation. Therefore, instead of urging them to begin anew in a separate tool, we assist them in converting a pre-existing recording into newsletter-ready format with considerably less effort,” stated Riverside’s co-founder and CEO Nadav Keyson to TechCrunch.

The company is further enhancing its recording suite to accommodate multi-camera recording setups and is providing users with the capability to include remote guests in their recordings.

The update also introduces new AI functionalities. Users can leverage AI to generate a preliminary draft of a recording immediately after completion, and the assistant can formulate hooks and content tailored for various social media channels. Furthermore, the company is integrating an AI video enhancement feature, designed from conversational video podcasts, which it claims can enhance the lighting, depth, and clarity of recordings.

Riverside, which has secured over $60 million in funding, joins a range of platforms that are exploring alternative publishing avenues to diversify or grow their revenue streams. For example, in March, Substack unveiled an integrated recording studio that competes head-to-head with Riverside, while Beehiiv also dipped into podcasting in April. In June, the social network Mastodon stated it would enable users to publish their posts as newsletters.