One thing that strikes me is that these auto-generated videos add no additional information to news reports; they merely present the content in a different way.
While that may be a way to broaden consumption of the content -- the auto-playing videos on Facebook feeds is a good example -- I don't think it does much to change readers'/viewers' perception of the quality of that content. If anything, it has the potential to cause them to perceive it as of lower quality than if they'd just read the article it was based on.
I see this as the next version of slideshows. News orgs used to like them because each new slide could be treated as a new page view. But readers found them to be, at best, of little additional value, and at worst, really frustrating to get through.
What news orgs really need is to invest resources to automate things that increase readers' perception of quality, and then figure out a way to monetize them, rather than looking at ways to monetize and then figuring out how to package content to fit the monetization strategy.
One initiative that can do that -- and this is where I think more resources should be invested -- is data science. Sifting through large public datasets and identifying trends, aberrations, etc. is something a computer can do as well or better than a human, and I would imagine that the fruits of those investments would be ripe for monetization.
Just one example: We have become conditioned to expect news content to be free, but we're more willing to pay for services. So imagine a news org that said, "Hey, we'll let you view all of our articles for free ... but then for a dollar a pop, you can sign up to receive an instant email notification when we publish a follow-up to a story you are interested in." I'd pay $1 to get notifications of follow-up stories to a particularly enthralling court case, or some local news of significant relevance to me. Best part is, news orgs already largely have the metadata that would make such a service work. They just need to invest in making computers do the work.