The National Geographic Society has a lot of videos—like, oceans of them. The 138-year-old nonprofit org, most famous for supporting expeditions to the furthest flung corners of the world (and the stacks of magazines in your grandfather’s attic), annually produces the equivalent of about 100 days of 4K video alone, according to the group’s Chief Technology Officer Jason Southern. Now Southern wants to lead an effort to send National Geographic’s cumulative 15 petabytes of video—or the data equivalent of over 3 billion high-res images from your phone—to the cloud, where the National Geographic’s editors and producers can quickly find clips and other assets they need to build future stories. With the migration, Southern aims to have the data not only backed up, but also positioned to fuel future AI efforts. The end result, if everything goes right, could enable production teams to use a plain-text request rather than a manual search to find, say, that one video of cone-bearing conifers in Northern California that was previously buried on a random drive. “You know, I’m looking for redwood trees in Northern California,” Southern told us. “We would be able to ask questions like that of a conversational interface in the media production platform, and then be able to pull up proxies of those almost immediately.” One big unknown: metadata.—BH |