Riverside is moving beyond recording by giving creators and business users a direct way to turn spoken content into newsletters. The new feature lets users convert videos and podcasts into newsletter-ready material with AI, then send those newsletters from inside Riverside’s app.
A Newsletter Tool Built Around Existing Recordings
The company is not positioning the move as a direct challenge to Mailchimp, Substack, Beehiiv or Ghost. Instead, Riverside is aiming the feature at people who already create recordings and need a faster path from conversation to written audience updates.
That distinction matters because the workflow starts from content that already exists. A creator may have recorded a podcast. A business team may have captured a video conversation. Riverside’s pitch is that the recording can become the source material for a newsletter without forcing the user to begin on a blank page in a separate publishing product.
Users can also create and send newsletters from scratch without using the AI conversion feature. That gives the tool two paths: repurposing recorded material, or drafting a more traditional newsletter directly in the app.
Why Spoken Content Is Central To The Strategy
Riverside’s co-founder and CEO Nadav Keyson told TechCrunch that the company sees a practical gap between speaking and writing. He said, “Substack and Beehiiv start you at a blank page. But our creators and business customers are already producing rich, information-dense spoken content on Riverside. For most people, speaking is easier and more natural than writing from scratch, and the ideas are already there, in the conversation. So instead of asking them to start over in a separate tool, we help them turn a recording they’ve already made into newsletter-ready content with far less effort,”
The logic is straightforward. Podcasts and videos often contain explanations, arguments, interviews and updates that can work in written form. The challenge is the manual labor of finding the useful parts, shaping them into a readable structure and preparing them for distribution.
By putting newsletter creation next to recording, Riverside is trying to reduce that handoff. The feature is less about replacing established newsletter platforms and more about making recordings easier to reuse for audience communication.
Recording Features Are Expanding Too
The newsletter launch is part of a broader update to Riverside’s recording suite. The company is adding support for multi-camera recording setups, which gives users more flexibility in how they capture video.
Riverside is also giving users the ability to add remote guests to recordings. For a platform already centered on video and podcast production, that expands the ways conversations can be captured inside the same workflow.
The update also brings several AI features tied to production and distribution:
- AI can draft a first cut of a recording as soon as it is finished.
- The assistant can create hooks and content for various social media platforms.
- An AI video enhancement feature can improve lighting, depth and sharpness of recordings.
Riverside says the video enhancement feature was trained on conversational video podcasts. That detail points to the kind of content the company is optimizing for: people speaking on camera, often in formats where clarity and presentation affect how professional the final recording feels.
The Publishing Lines Are Blurring
Riverside has raised over $60 million in funding, and its move into newsletters comes as other platforms expand into adjacent publishing formats. The pattern is not limited to recording tools moving into writing. Newsletter and social platforms are also adding features that overlap with audio, video and newsletter distribution.
Substack launched a built-in recording studio in March, creating a product area that competes directly with Riverside. In April, Beehiiv ventured into podcasting. In June, Mastodon said it will allow users to publish their posts as newsletters.
Taken together, these moves show how publishing tools are becoming less tied to a single format. A podcast platform wants to help users publish written newsletters. A newsletter platform wants to support podcasting. A social network wants posts to become newsletters.
For creators and businesses, the practical appeal is efficiency. A single recorded conversation can become a video, a podcast, social posts and now a newsletter. Riverside’s update is built around that repurposing idea, with AI handling more of the conversion and preparation work.
What Riverside Is Really Betting On
The company’s newsletter feature depends on a simple assumption: users who already record valuable conversations should not have to rebuild those ideas from scratch for every channel. If the conversation contains the substance, the software can help reshape it for different audiences and formats.
That does not make Riverside the same kind of product as Mailchimp, Substack, Beehiiv or Ghost. Those platforms remain associated with newsletter publishing as a primary activity. Riverside is approaching newsletters as an extension of recording, editing and content reuse.
The result is a broader toolset for creators and business customers who want to keep more of their workflow in one place. Riverside is still centered on video and podcast recording, but its latest update makes written publishing part of the same production loop.