Why has Wasabi bought Curio AI?

Earlier this week, Wasabi announced that it had bought Curio AI from GrayMeta. And that by spring of this year, it would incorporate Curio AI’s technology into “a new class of AI-powered intelligent storage for the media and entertainment industry”. So what’s the thinking behind the move? What is Wasabi trying to achieve?

One quote from the press release makes a key aim clear. “A video archive without detailed metadata is like a library without a card catalog,” David Friend, Wasabi’s CEO states. “This is where AI comes in. AI can find faces, logos, objects, and even specific voices. Without it, finding exactly the segments you are looking for requires tedious and time-consuming manual effort.”

It’s no coincidence that Liverpool Football Club, a Wasabi customer, is soon mentioned. Just imagine the huge amount of historic video it holds. That’s not only content that could be repackaged for its fans but provided on-demand to documentary makers and broadcasters – if the right clip of Kevin Keegan in his heyday can be found.

The power of localisation

Last year, we wrote an article about how cloud computing was transforming football at all levels, from local teams all the way up to the Liverpool FCs of this world.

There is an enormous amount of footage out there, some of it shot by fans, that is currently sitting wasted in a virtual shoebox. It’s online, somewhere, but it’s uncategorised. And as a result, unless someone stumbles upon a golden clip, it’s useless.

Now imagine you can apply AI to detect people’s faces. Maybe the team coach wants to show a player their highlights (and lowlights) reel. That’s a perfect job for AI, and we wouldn’t be at all surprised to see Wasabi offer it as a service down the line.

Then we come to the bigger brands. The ones who have popular pages and channels on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, where videos rack up millions of views.

Right now, it’s probably the social media team that converts their archives into short, shareable videos. How much better if AI could do 90% of the job, so that all the team needed to do is add the finishing touches?

AI will also bring the power to unearth gems that would otherwise be hidden. Even for well-resourced celebrities and brands, the amount of unwatched footage must be mountainous. AI makes it possible to find the needle in that haystack. A needle that might otherwise be forgotten.

The power of metadata

Metadata has been with us for decades. Data such as time taken, location, and ownership. It’s all embedded into our photos, our documents and our videos, but it’s also incomplete. Who has the time or knowledge to tag a video with all the people in a scene?

To quote Aaron Edell, formerly GrayMeta CEO and now Wasabi’s Senior Vice President of AI and Machine Learning, “AI-powered storage will allow Wasabi customers to instantly find exactly what they need amongst millions of hours of footage and unleash the value in their archives.”

He adds: “We believe this will be the most significant advance in the storage industry since the invention of object storage.”

Now, perhaps that last statement overstates things, but we can certainly understand where Edell is coming from. The next step is to see how Wasabi’s Curio-AI-powered storage system works in practice – and what people manage to do with it.