Seagate and axle ai Unveils 'Smarter Media' Product Collaboration With Lyve Edge-to-Cloud Mass Storage Platform

Why just stash content away when you can repurpose and breathe new life into it while improving productivity and ROI with powerful search tools?

Seagate Technology Holdings plc and axle ai, Inc. have joined forces to provide complete solutions to store, and also manage and provide instant user access to many terabytes or petabytes of video content.

Media is safer on Seagate storage; axle ai’s software makes it findable as well.

The collaboration is centered around the Seagate Lyve edge-to-cloud mass storage platform, designed to offer a coherent storage architecture extending from on-premise removable media through cloud storage-as-a-service (STaaS), all from a single vendor. Axle ai’s software is a browser-based front end that can be used across multiple storage devices and services, making it easy for media teams to remotely search and manage their content from anywhere. The 2 companies are broadening access to cost effective smart media solutions for real world applications.

There is an explosion of video content. IDC has estimated that the sum of data generated globally by 2025 is set to accelerate exponentially to 175ZB. A growing, double-digit percentage of this storage is used to house media files. Meanwhile, approximately 400,000 video teams WW are responsible for capturing, editing, and managing this content, but much of it becomes difficult to leverage soon after capture; in a report commissioned by Seagate, IDC estimates that more than two-thirds of data stored is not readily searchable or available for access after initial use.

Video files have become large and numerous, while ongoing capture is so pervasive that most content storage requires a hybrid cloud strategy. Ideally, the most immediate media is captured on SSDs and HDDs – based storage solutions and then transferred to a cloud infrastructure allowing remote access and global search. This is suited to Lyve offerings, which span a range of media use cases with affordable capabilities.

The 2 companies have entered into a broad-ranging solutions agreement where a full range of Seagate products and services will now be offered by axle ai in conjunction with their own media indexing, tagging, and search software.

These joint solutions include:

Each configuration includes an instance of axle ai 2021, the company’s browser-based remote media search software. It includes a browser front end allowing multiple users to tag, catalog and search their media files, as well as a range of AI-driven options for automatically cataloging and discovering specific visual and audio attributes within those files. For instance, audio tracks can be automatically transcribed, with the resulting transcript immediately searchable in the timeline; likewise, it provides face recognition with integrated training for new faces over time. The modular nature of the system supports additional plug-ins for object and logo recognition, and identification of sports highlights. The software can be used to create distributed team workflows for storage pools that would otherwise be siloed and hard to search.

axle ai screenshot
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Given the vast amounts of video – often many terabytes – that can be accumulated by a video team in even a single shoot, this system allows rapid search and management of those files. The software also includes a range of plug-in panels for Adobe’s Creative Cloud application suite software, including Adobe Premiere Pro, AfterEffects, Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. These panels allow creative team members on any Mac or Windows laptop to directly search, access, and download media files wherever they are located.

Sam Bogoch, CEO, axle ai, said: “For years, creative teams have expressed the need for a simplified and cost-efficient way to store, search and manage their content. Legacy solutions for broadcasters have been expensive and complex, but these powerful Seagate-axle ai bundles manage to bring state-of-the-art AI and MAM (media asset management) capabilities to the widest possible range of creative teams. They work at nearly any scale, from terabytes of storage on set, to petabytes of storage in the cloud.“

“Seagate’s latest mass capacity storage solutions simplify how data is securely captured, aggregated, transported, and managed,” said Jeff Fochtman, SVP, marketing, Seagate. “Together, axle ai and Seagate deliver even greater value by offering a set of scalable solutions that help media and entertainment professionals’ access and use mass data at scale at the speed of their business.”

Pricing ranges from $995 for a 2-drive direct attach RAID configuration, $19,995 for larger network storage hardware deployed solution configurations, to $10 per-month, per-terabyte including Lyve Cloud storage-as-a-service solution. All bundles feature Seagate’s value, performance, and data security, with a search and management layer provided by axle ai 2021.