Run it yourself, or have it run for you
Schibsted open-sourced a working article-to-video pipeline. If your team wants to run one, start there. This page is an honest account of what it leaves out and what that costs.
- Videofy Minimal is free and Apache-2.0 licensed. Schibsted published a working article-to-video pipeline — fetch, script, match visuals, narrate, review, render — and you can read all of it in an afternoon.
- It runs on your own machine with your own OpenAI and ElevenLabs keys, keeps each project as files on disk, and is built for digital signage screens.
- MediaThrive is the same shape of pipeline run as a service: hosted rendering with queueing and retries, team accounts, seven output presets, a generated presenter, and monitoring that already watches your sources.
- The honest split: Videofy Minimal costs engineering time and API bills. MediaThrive costs money and no engineering time. If you have the engineers and the signage use case, start with the repository.
What Videofy Minimal gets right
It is a good piece of engineering and the licence is generous. A Next.js CMS orchestrates the work, a FastAPI service does the generation, Remotion previews it and a local renderer produces the MP4 — and an editor reviews, tweaks and reruns before anything renders, which is the same conviction we build on. It installs with Homebrew and two API keys, or with Docker Compose, and it ships with an example video so you can see the output before you commit an afternoon. Anyone evaluating this category should read it.
- Apache-2.0: commercial use, modification and redistribution all permitted
- Runs on a laptop with an OpenAI key and an ElevenLabs key
- Human-in-the-loop review in the CMS before the render
- Per-brand JSON for logo, intro, wipe, outro, colours and voice
Feature-by-Feature Comparison
See exactly how MediaThrive and Videofy Minimal stack up across every capability.
The same pipeline, minus the machine to run it on
The repository is honest that it is a reduced version: it renders locally, one video at a time, and keeps each project as a folder of files under projects/. That is the right design for a tool you run on a laptop, and the wrong one for a newsroom with a deadline. There is no queue, so a second video waits; no retry, so a failed render is a person noticing; and no shared state, so two editors are two copies. MediaThrive is that pipeline with the operations attached — hosted rendering, queueing, retries, and one account the whole desk works in.
- Queued rendering with retries, rather than one render at a time
- Projects live in an account, not in a folder on somebody’s machine
- Team accounts with roles, so the desk is not passing files around
- Nobody on your side owns ffmpeg, a render box, or its uptime
Screens in a building, or the feed on a phone
Videofy Minimal says plainly what it is for: short videos for digital signage screens, in vertical and horizontal. That target explains most of its design — a screen in a foyer has no sound, no comments and no algorithm. MediaThrive targets the newsroom's own site and the social feeds, which is why the output is seven presets across four sizes from 9:16 to 16:9, why captions are word-timed and burned into the frame for a muted feed, and why there is a generated presenter lip-synced to the narration rather than reporter clips somebody has to record in advance.
Where the stories come from
This is the gap that costs the most engineering time and shows up the least in a feature list. Videofy Minimal ships fetchers for Reuters and AP plus a generic HTML one for testing, and its README says each brand or newsroom should build a proper fetcher integration. That is a fair thing for an open-source subset to say, and it is also a project of its own for every source you care about. MediaThrive starts from a monitoring pipeline that is already watching your sources, so the article arrives without anyone writing a scraper for it.
Pricing Comparison
How MediaThrive and Videofy Minimal compare on cost.
50,000 credits, no card
50,000 credits: audio, video, monitoring and text
240,000 credits, five managed teams
Contract terms and dedicated support
Apache-2.0. Clone it, change it, ship it commercially.
Manuscript generation and media matching, at your own rates
Narration, at your own rates
Fetchers for your sources, a machine to render on, and keeping both working
Videofy Minimal is free and the licence is permissive, so the only money it costs is the OpenAI and ElevenLabs usage behind it. The cost that does not appear on any invoice is engineering: a fetcher for your own sources, a machine that renders, and somebody who owns both. MediaThrive is the opposite trade — a bill instead of a backlog item. Which is cheaper depends entirely on whether your team has the engineers to spare.
See Full PricingWho Should Choose What?
An honest look at which platform fits your needs better.
Choose MediaThrive if...
- Nobody on your team wants to own a render box and a fetcher integration
- You publish to web and social feeds, not to screens in a building
- You need more than one person working in the same place, with roles
- You want the stories found for you, not fetched by a script you wrote
- You want audio, podcasts and article generation from the same account
Choose Videofy Minimal if...
- You have engineers and would rather spend their time than your budget
- Your use case is digital signage, which is exactly what it was built for
- You want to read every line of the pipeline before you trust it
- Your content or your regulator requires the whole thing to run in-house
- You want to fork it and build something we do not sell
Frequently Asked Questions
Common questions about MediaThrive vs Videofy Minimal.
Read the repository first. Then decide.
If you would rather not run it yourself, the trial is free for 14 days and needs no card.
Also Compare
Evaluating other tools? See how MediaThrive stacks up.
Every statement about Videofy Minimal on this page was checked against github.com/schibsted/videofy_minimal on 12 September 2026. That repository is the public subset of Videofy; its README states that it leaves out most of the integrations and infrastructure Schibsted runs internally, so nothing here is a claim about Schibsted's own product.
All third-party trademarks, logos, and brand names are the property of their respective owners and are used here for identification and comparison purposes only. Use of these names and logos does not imply any affiliation with or endorsement by these companies.