Tag Archives: media search software

Axle ai Media Search and Editing Platform Teams Up with XenData’s New X100 Active Archive

Joint solutions provide cost-effective archiving and media repurposing for video content.

Boston, MA, USA, April 19, 2022 — Axle ai, the leading independent developer of media search and collaborative editing software (NAB booth N4816), and XenData, the provider of highly scalable cutting-edge data storage solutions (NAB booth N1516) , are launching support within axle ai 2022 for XenData’s X100 active archive. The resulting combination of browser-based search, media management, AI tagging and editing with robust back end storage facilities is ideal for creative video, medical imaging, video surveillance and other applications with high volumes of large files.

Axle ai’s media management software is deployed at over 800 customers worldwide, including leading media companies such as Paramount, Warner Bros. and NBC Universal. The X100 is powered by XenData Archive Series software which is trusted by over 1,500 organizations in over 90 countries, including many of the world’s largest media companies. Dramatic industry consolidation over the last 18 months – with companies such as Masstech, Levels Beyond, CatDV, Primestream and DIVA being acquired – has left axle ai and XenData in strong positions to gain market share in high-capacity media storage applications.

(Caption: axle ai 2022 user interface)

In addition to market changes, technology is having a rapid impact on the space. Traditionally, large media repositories have needed extensive manual tagging to make video, audio and image content searchable. Axle ai 2022 employs powerful machine learning to create rich metadata for media files, automatically. These include axle Speech (speech transcription for $1 per hour of footage), axle Tags (face recognition, object recognition and logo recognition), and axle OCR functionality to extract text from images and PDFs. This opens major new market segments to the axle ai/XenData combination, ones which would have previously required prohibitive amounts of labor to make the video searchable.

Axle ai 2022 supports server configurations with Linux and MacOS as well as Windows (via VMware). Apple’s latest Mac Studio hardware, with 10 or 20 powerful CPU cores in a compact desktop package, is an ideal low-cost engine for deployments of axle ai 2022. The media management solution accesses the Xendata X100 via 10 Gigabit Ethernet and XenData’s XML API, for a seamless user experience across the two products.

The streamlined, elegant axle ai 2022 user interface is accessed via the browsers of multiple users, who can search, manage and collaborate around huge media repositories without needing to know any technical details of how the back end is managed. In addition, the new www.axledit.com collaborative editing tool and axle ai’s Premiere panel allow media to be dragged directly into the timeline of both cloud-based editing and traditional on-premise editing for Mac or Windows.

The X100 archive strongly adheres to standards. It supports writing to LTO cartridges using LTFS and writes to ODA cartridges using the Sony interchange standard. It fully supports the Microsoft security model based on Active Directory, making it easy to install in an existing Windows domain; likewise, axle ai 2022 also supports Active Directory for user authentication.

(Caption: The axle/Xendata solution manages even petascale archives)

Multiple X100 systems may be synchronized using XenData’s Multi-Site Sync service which links multiple archives in different locations, creating a single global file system accessible from anywhere. As soon as a file is archived to LTO or ODA at one location, it becomes available as a stub file within the global file system. When a user makes a change by writing, overwriting or deleting a file, that change is propagated to all locations. This provides a consistent up-to-date set of files across the entire distributed organization.

Sam Bogoch, axle ai CEO, commented, “The design of the X100 is based on everything the XenData team have learned from the 1500+ XenData archives that have been installed worldwide. It uses a simple architecture which takes advantage of the power of today’s multi-processor servers.”

About axle ai, Inc.:

axle ai (http://www.axle.ai) – We make media smarter. Axle ai is the recognized leader in developing radically simple media management software. It solutions have helped over 800 organizations improve the way they create, share and store digital video content with media management solutions that are easy to install, use and afford. axle’s radically simple media management uniquely addresses a burgeoning need and has caught on rapidly among video professionals in post-production, education, broadcast, corporate, sports, house of worship, non-profit, advertising-marketing, and government organizations worldwide. axle ai, Inc. is a privately held company; its founders have extensive industry experience in media asset management for creative applications. Investors include Stadia Ventures, Jason Calacanis’s LAUNCH accelerator and Quake Capital. Learn more at https://www.axle.ai and https://www.axledit.com.

About XenData:

XenData (http://www.xendata.com) is a global provider of professional data storage solutions optimized for video and other applications with high volumes of large files. It offers cutting edge hybrid cloud solutions and highly scalable on-premises active archive systems. XenData has customers in over 90 countries, including government organizations, global media companies and other large corporations. For more information visit: www.xendata.com.

Axle ai contact:

Rachel Fearon
Operations Manager
Axle ai, Inc.
T: +1 415-225-1926
E: rachel@axle.ai

XenData contact:

Alyssa A Pingul
Marketing Specialist
XenData, Inc.
T: +1 925-464-2618
E: aadriano@xendata.com

Pie Town, a reality TV house in Hollywood, uses axle ai to search and repurpose all their archival footage.

Press & Media Contact:
Rachel Fearon
Operations Manager
Axle ai, Inc.
+1 415-225-1926
rachel@axle.ai
www.axle.ai

14 Hours Remaining to Invest in Axle.ai on Republic.co

Company announces $1m in bookings to date in 2021; new customers include WatchMojo, Serhant, ASG.

Boston, MA – USA | September 27, 2021 — Video management software vendor Axle.ai is in the home stretch of its 2nd successful equity crowdfund on Republic.co, which ends at midnight PDT today. Axle.ai’s previous equity crowdfunding round, in 2020, was oversubscribed, and this campaign has raised $283,000 (over 11x the original goal of $25,000) of a possible $428,000. The campaign page is at https://republic.co/axle-ai; a 3-minute pitch video featuring Axle.ai’s management can be viewed at tinyurl.com/axlein3mins. Investors can commit as little as $150 to participate in the campaign.

Today, Axle.ai announced it had received over $1m in orders to date in 2021, up from its 2020 tally of $667k and positioning the company to deliver its targeted $1.2-1.3m in revenue for the year. Recent orders include YouTube leaders WatchMojo and Million Dollar Listing star Ryan Serhant’s media team. The company has also been notified that ASG LLC, a leading systems integrator for the media industry, will be launching solutions featuring Axle.ai’s software in Q4.

There is a worldwide explosion of video content. IDC estimates that global data will accelerate exponentially to 175 zettabytes by 2025. A growing, double-digit percentage of this storage is used to house media files. Meanwhile, approximately 400,000 video teams worldwide are responsible for capturing, editing, and managing this content; more than 2/3 of it isn’t readily searchable or available for access after initial use. Axle.ai has more than 700 customers worldwide, including high-profile names such as the NY Yankees, Madison Square Garden, the LA Clippers, PWC, Elevation Church, WB and Paramount. A recent profile of reality-TV production house Pie Town can be viewed at youtu.be/H1xkcQ0YJO8.

Sam Bogoch, CEO of axle ai, said “For years, creative teams have needed a simplified and cost-efficient way to remotely search and manage their content. Our second successful Republic equity crowdfunding raise is helping us deliver these solutions more widely – we encourage everyone to visit republic.co/axle-ai today.”

Other highlights:

•    Last month, Axle.ai announced it had completed acquisition of Noscos, an AI/ML startup focusing on face recognition and logo recognition applications.

•    Another big win for Axle.ai during the crowdfund was securing its largest deal ever – a $365,000 deployment at a major Asia-Pacific region broadcaster.

•    In July, Seagate and Axle.ai announced a strategic partnership around Seagate’s Lyve and LaCie solutions. The companies have begun joint sales activities and have deployed the first combined system to Togethxr.com, a women’s sports media company backed by Alex Morgan and Sue Bird.

Press & Media Contact:
Katy Scott
axle ai, Inc.
+1 617-262-9222
www.axle.ai

Video Software Company axle.ai Featured in Business Insider Article

Successful axle.ai Equity Crowdfunding Campaign on Republic.co Passes $250,000 Raised With 4 Days Remaining.

Boston, MA, USA | September 23, 2021 — Video management software vendor axle.ai was just covered in the prominent Business Insider website https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/axle-ai-the-search-engine-for-internal-media-files-is-equity-crowdfunding-to-make-video-editing-simpler-1030818742 , in an article describing axle’s startup journey and Republic.co equity crowdfunding round which ends midnight Pacific Time on Monday, Sept. 27th.

Axle’s previous equity crowdfunding round, in 2020, was oversubscribed, and the current round is rapidly approaching a similar outcome – over $250,000 (10x the original goal of $25,000) out of a possible $428,000 in this round is already committed. A 3-minute pitch video featuring the axle.ai management team can be viewed at https://tinyurl.com/axlein3mins , and the Republic campaign page is at https://republic.co/axle-ai .

(Caption: axle ai Cofounders Sam Bogoch and Patrice Gouttebel)

The equity crowdfunding campaign highlights axle.ai 2021, the company’s browser-based remote media search software. The software 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, axle.ai 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. To date, axle.ai has more than 700 customers worldwide, including high-profile names such as the NY Yankees, Madison Square Garden, the LA Clippers, PWC, Elevation Church, Paramount and Warner Bros. A recent profile of an axle customer, reality TV production house Pie Town (producers of HGTV’s House Hunting and Flip or Flop shows), can be viewed at youtu.be/H1xkcQ0YJO8.

(Caption: Editorial user at Pie Town with axle ai)

One key for axle.ai in the last two years has been its software’s ability to enable remote work by video production teams. Often, video collaboration has relied on manual transfer of files between sites, often using portable hard drives and Fedex. Having a browser-based solution gives media teams much more flexibility in managing and staffing their projects to a quick outcome, and the ability to use AI-driven engines to search and reuse the content makes it much more valuable and relevant for modern marketing purposes, especially via social media.

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 over time. The software also includes a range of plug-in panels for Adobe’s Creative Cloud application suite software, which allow creative team members on any Mac or Windows laptop to directly search, access, and download media files wherever they are located. In addition, the company offers a no-code workflow automation tool, Connectr, as well as a freemium speech transcription tool, Ascribe. These are complementary to its core media management software and together provide a complete solution for axle.ai’s customers.

• This month, axle.ai announced that it had completed acquisition of Noscos, an AI/ML startup focusing on face recognition and logo recognition applications. This further enhances axle.ai’s technology stack while bringing new management strength to its engineering team in Eastern Europe.

• Another major announcement by the company was securing its largest deal ever – a $365,000 deployment at a major Asia-Pacific region broadcaster. Combined with other significant new customers as well as the new partnership with Seagate, this puts the company on track for a record year, with sales roughly double its 2020 tally.

• A recent strategic partnership with storage vendor Seagate is driving a new level of opportunity for axle.ai, as joint sales efforts target large brands and media organizations with significant storage needs. The two companies have concluded their first joint sale, with womens’ media network Togethxr, which includes Seagate’s Lyve Cloud and LaCie products, as well as axle.ai 2021.

Sam Bogoch, CEO of axle.ai, said “For years, creative teams have expressed the need for a simplified and cost-efficient way to remotely search and manage their content. Legacy solutions for broadcasters have been expensive and complex, but our mission is to state-of-the-art AI and MAM (media asset management) capabilities to the widest possible range of creative teams. Our second successful Republic equity crowdfunding raise is helping us achieve these goals.”

About axle.ai, Inc.:

Axle.ai (http://www.axle.ai) – We make media smarter. Axle.ai is the recognized leader in developing radically simple media management software. Its solutions have helped over 700 organizations improve the way they create, share and store digital video content with media management solutions that are easy to install, use and afford. axle’s radically simple media management uniquely addresses a burgeoning need and has caught on rapidly among video professionals in post-production, education, broadcast, corporate, sports, house of worship, non-profit, advertising-marketing, and government organizations worldwide. Axle.ai, Inc. is a privately held company; its founders have extensive industry experience in media asset management for creative applications. Investors include Stadia Ventures, Jason Calacanis’s LAUNCH accelerator and Quake Capital.

Learn more at http://www.axle.ai and https://republic.co/axle-ai.

There is a worldwide explosion of video content. The market intelligence firm IDC has estimated that the sum of data generated globally by 2025 is set to accelerate exponentially to 175 zettabytes. A growing, double-digit percentage of this storage is used to house media files. Meanwhile, approximately 400,000 video teams worldwide 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 axle.ai’s partner Seagate, IDC estimates that more than two-thirds of data stored is not readily searchable or available for access after initial use.

axle ai Management team in 3-minute Power Pitch video:

Press & Media Contact:
Katy Scott
axle ai, Inc.
+1 617-262-9222
www.axle.ai

5 Days To Go In Successful axle ai Equity Crowdfunding Fundraise on Republic.co

Company has raised nearly 10x initial target, aims for Reg. CF maximum of $428,000; CEO Sam Bogoch to be interviewed by Brian Mac Mahon of Expert Dojo tomorrow.

Boston, MA, USA | September 22, 2021 — Video management software vendor axle.ai is in the home stretch of its 2nd successful equity crowdfunding campaign on Republic.co, which ends at midnight Pacific Time on Monday, Sept. 27th. Axle ai is exhibiting at the virtual TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 conference ending today, and its CEO, Sam Bogoch, will be interviewed by Brian Mac Mahon of LA’s Expert Dojo startup accelerator in a live webinar tomorrow at 10:30AM ET – signup is at https://axle.ai/event-registration/.

 

 

 

 

 

(Caption: Sam Bogoch and Brian Mac Mahon)

Axle’s previous equity crowdfunding round, in 2020, was oversubscribed, and the current round is rapidly approaching a similar outcome – over $240,000 (nearly 10x the original goal of $25,000) out of a possible $428,000 in this round is already committed. The campaign page is at https://republic.co/axle-ai, and a 3-minute pitch video featuring axle ai’s management team can be viewed at https://youtu.be/9vJ4LMUnNH8.

There is a worldwide explosion of video content. The market intelligence firm IDC has estimated that the sum of data generated globally by 2025 is set to accelerate exponentially to 175 zettabytes. A growing, double-digit percentage of this storage is used to house media files. Meanwhile, approximately 400,000 video teams worldwide 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 axle ai’s partner Seagate, IDC estimates that more than two-thirds of data stored is not readily searchable or available for access after initial use. To date, axle ai has more than 700 customers worldwide, including high-profile names such as the NY Yankees, Madison Square Garden, the LA Clippers, PWC, Elevation Church, Paramount and Warner Bros. A recent profile of reality TV production house Pie Town can be viewed at youtu.be/H1xkcQ0YJO8.

The current crowdfunding round highlights axle ai 2021, the company’s browser-based remote media search software. The software 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, axle ai 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.

One key for axle ai in the last two years has been its software’s ability to enable remote work by video production teams. Often, video collaboration has relied on manual transfer of files between sites, often using portable hard drives and Fedex. Having a browser-based solution gives media teams much more flexibility in managing and staffing their projects to a quick outcome, and the ability to use AI-driven engines to search and reuse the content makes it much more valuable and relevant for modern marketing purposes, especially via social media.

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 over time. The software also includes a range of plug-in panels for Adobe’s Creative Cloud application suite software. These panels allow creative team members on any Mac or Windows laptop to directly search, access, and download media files wherever they are located. In addition, the company offers a no-code workflow automation tool, Connectr, as well as a freemium speech transcription tool, Ascribe. These are complementary to its core media management software and together provide a complete solution for axle ai’s customers.

(Caption: Axle AI cofounders pitch on Meet the Drapers)

This month, axle ai announced that it had completed acquisition of Noscos, an AI/ML startup focusing on face recognition and logo recognition applications. This further enhances axle ai’s technology stack while bringing new management strength to its engineering team in Eastern Europe.

Another major announcement by the company was securing its largest deal ever – a $365,000 deployment at a major Asia-Pacific region broadcaster. Combined with other significant new customers as well as the new partnership with Seagate, this puts the company on track for a record year, with sales roughly double its 2020 tally.

Sam Bogoch, CEO of axle ai, said “For years, creative teams have expressed the need for a simplified and cost-efficient way to remotely search and manage their content. We’ve been able to build that system, and have had a great experience raising funds on Republic under the Regulation CF framework. We’ve already raised nearly 10 times our initial target”

About axle ai, Inc.:

Axle ai (http://www.axle.ai) – We make media smarter. Axle ai is the recognized leader in developing radically simple media management software. Its solutions have helped over 700 organizations improve the way they create, share and store digital video content with media management solutions that are easy to install, use and afford. axle’s radically simple media management uniquely addresses a burgeoning need and has caught on rapidly among video professionals in post-production, education, broadcast, corporate, sports, house of worship, non-profit, advertising-marketing, and government organizations worldwide.

Axle ai, Inc. is a privately held company; its founders have extensive industry experience in media asset management for creative applications. The company’s previous equity crowdfunding round on Republic was oversubscribed. Learn more at http://www.axle.ai and https://republic.co/axle-ai.

About Expert Dojo:

Expert DOJO is the most active international early-stage startup accelerator in Southern California. Since 2018, Expert Dojo has invested in over 100 startups to accelerate their growth. What makes us special is our focus on building visionary companies. We believe that if you can visualize your unicorn in specificity, you have a higher probability of achieving its full potential. That’s where Expert DOJO comes in. We typically invest in pre-seed and seed stage startups that have a product, a go to market strategy and a potential for high growth. Most of our startups are minority- and female-founded technology companies.

axle ai’s 3-minute Power Pitch by its management team:

Press & Media Contact:
Katy Scott
axle ai, Inc.
+1 617-262-9222
www.axle.ai

Easy as Pie – Pie Town Uses Axle AI to Manage Media Remotely

Remote ‘smarter media’ workflows allow 60-person post production team to work effectively throughout COVID transition; axle ai software replaced legacy MAM.

Los Angeles, CA – USA | September 20, 2021 — Ever since the pandemic started, many of us have been working from home. At Pie Town Productions, a 25-year-old TV production company based in North Hollywood, they’ve been working from “home” for over two decades. That’s be-cause they produce many of the well-known house renovation/flipping programs on HGTV, including House Hunters, Flip or Flop, Flipping 101 with Tarek El Moussa, and Christina on the Coast. The company is one of Greater LA’s most successful and prosper-ous reality shops.

Yet even Pie Town had to adjust when COVID-19 obligated everyone to “shelter in place,” forcing the vast majority of its staff to work remotely. Fortunately, they had implemented axle ai software to manage all their media, which comprises 100 terabytes of online/work-in-progress clips stored on Avid NEXIS Pro shared storage, and another 200 terabytes of near-line data on a NAS (network attached storage) system. Axle’s web-based user interface is engineered to be accessible from anywhere on any device. Further, axle enables them to select clips from low-resolution proxy media, with final rendering occurring back on the servers, to avoid having to transfer huge files back and forth during postproduction sessions.

“With axle in place, we can now all look at the same clip, at the same time,” explains Dana Besnoy, Pie Town’s SVP of Post Produc-tion. “Axle has connected us in a way we didn’t realize was possible when we all started scampering out of the building at the start of the pandemic.”


(Caption: Dana Besnoy, SVP of Post Production, Pie Town)

Pie Town has a very busy schedule, shooting three to five full episodes of House Hunters per week in addition to its local produc-tions. In all, they produce 200-300 episodes of reality and lifestyle programming per year. The raw footage is copied to the NAS at the end of each shoot, and axle ai automatically generates a low-res proxy, which is then available to the entire team. In all, between 40 and 60 Pie Town employees access axle ai on a daily basis.

“This allows all of our departments to access and review media with their needs in mind. Production can review for camera/audio concerns and/or crew feedback. Story can get a head start on their string out. And Post can access clips needed for transcription,” notes Besnoy. “Axle has been a great tool for tying us all together.”

Like many post houses, Pie Town’s post production workflow uses Avid Media Composer 2018 as their nonlinear editor, with the editors working in a fully Mac environment, and must accommodate a wide variety of original camera formats. “We’re able to accept almost any format that comes from the field; we accept any Sony camera, any Canon camera. Most of our internal equipment is ENG-style workhorse and digital cinema.

Not surprisingly, Pie Town has been leveraging media asset management (MAM) technology for some time now. They were pioneers with Apple Final Cut Server and, when that product’s development was terminated, they transitioned to another MAM for nearly a decade. However, notes Besnoy, that approach hit a roadblock, because the high operating costs and user complexity were a bad match for their needs, and maintaining it was getting more difficult over time. “We made the easy decision to switch to axle; we have millions and millions of digital assets that we need to maintain as an ongoing, growing, organic digital library, and transition-ing to axle just made sense,” she explains. “It’s user-friendly; straight out of the box, it works; setup was seamless and transitioning and transferring our assets from our old MAM to axle took under a week.”

“Axle has been a great MAM solution for us; we’ve been using it for about a year now, and our user base tends not to be highly technical, so the UI of axle is perfect for them,” she observes. “I’ve gotten many compliments from our users that its ease of use is superior to our previous MAM.”

Pie Town’s video testimonial is available at youtu.be/H1xkcQ0YJO8

About axle ai:

Axle ai (http://www.axle.ai) – We make media smarter. Axle ai is the recognized leader in developing radically simple media man-agement software. Its solutions have helped over 700 organizations improve the way they create, share and store digital video con-tent with media management solutions that are easy to install, use and afford. axle’s radically simple software uniquely addresses a burgeoning need and has caught on rapidly among video professionals in post-production, education, broadcast, corporate, sports, house of worship, non-profit, advertising-marketing, and government organizations worldwide.

Axle ai, Inc. is a privately held company; its founders have extensive industry experience in media asset management for creative applications. Investors include Stadia Ventures, Jason Calacanis’s LAUNCH accelerator and Quake Capital. You can invest in axle ai on Republic through Sept. 27th – republic.co/axle-ai. The company is also exhibiting at this week’s virtual TechCrunch Disrupt conference; a pitch video is online at youtu.be/9vJ4LMUnNH8

For more information, please visit https://axle.ai/

Press & Media Contact:
Katy Scott
axle ai, Inc.
+1 617-262-9222
www.axle.ai/