Today, WRAL TV, the powerhouse Raleigh, N.C. TV station anchoring the broadcast arm of Capitol Broadcasting Company, announced a new partnership with Eon Media to launch a highly advanced AI powered media store. The digital storefront is called WRAL Archives.
The archive platform will serve both hyper-local (North Carolina) clients but also serve media clients and content creators across the globe as a source of stock and archival footage. WRAL Archives will house a deep library of video, photography and audio assets including decades of news content and local programming.
The new WRAL Archives website powered by AI technology is scheduled for widespread release in Q1 2023. Until then, interested users can sign up for an opportunity for early access by visiting wralarchives.com.
WRAL and Capitol Broadcasting Company have long been known as “best in class” for cutting-edge broadcast firsts. WRAL-TV was the first to broadcast in HD, 4K and ATSC 3.0. The launch of WRAL Archives continues the tradition, offering the most dynamic, comprehensive, and user-friendly database of AI supported search available.
The WRAL Archives project is led by Pete Sockett, WRAL-TV’s Director of Engineering and Operations and Jon Accarrino CBC’s VP, Strategic Business Development.
“The challenge of building an archive solution for WRAL-TV created several unique opportunities,” Sockett explained. “The main value of any archive is its searchability. So, finding the right artificial intelligence partner for this project was critical. We have a half century worth of video content which would be impossible to process manually without the assistance of AI technology.”
Accarrino added: “Our vision for this technology goes beyond just creating a searchable database of archive videos. We are building an AI-based business intelligence dashboard capable of providing near-real-time insights from content that aired 50 years ago to earlier today. Something like this has never been done before and we are very excited about the opportunities that it will create for our company in the future.”
Some key highlights of the WRAL Archives project:
Industry innovation: WRAL’s archive platform will debut as the most advanced AI-powered archive solution in the industry. No company has ever presented archival content in such a comprehensive manner before.
AI-driven metadata extraction: State-of-the-art AI is automatically extracting dynamic metadata from 50+ years of archival content. The deep collection of data points includes facial sentiment, audio transcription, logo identification, subject demographics, object identification, weather conditions, intelligent summaries, and more.
Community resource: In addition to making the WRAL archives available to professionals looking to license content, we are building a user-friendly platform for both researchers and the community to use as an online video museum of North Carolina’s history.
AI dashboards: Artificial intelligence is being used to create analytics dashboards for WRAL’s leadership team providing up to the minute data for everything from sponsorship values to actionable news insights.
Reduce employee workload: An AI-enhanced archive storefront will help professionals find content and make licensing requests without adding additional operations overhead for the WRAL team.
NFT integration: Users will have the ability to turn archive content into digital memorabilia as NFTs (non-fungible tokens).
Eon Media founder & CEO Ashish Agrawal further explains the unique nature of the project, “This is not a streaming service. It is a dedicated storefront using dynamic metadata from decades of archival content, enabling a first of its kind scalable solution.” Agrawal continues, “WRAL has always been at the forefront of innovation, and they challenge the status quo. They are the first company to enable access to archival content in such a comprehensive manner.”
Eon Media was recently recognized at the 2022 NAB Show “Product of the Year Awards,” with a win in “AI/Machine Learning” for their Eon Extract product.
