Veritone® Announces Agreement That Enables Carson Entertainment Group to License and Distribute Content Through Digital Media Hub™
Veritone’s Digital Media Hub Hosts the Entire Library of ‘The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson’, Enabling Greater Accessibility for Licensing
COSTA MESA, Calif. — Feb. 19, 2019 — Veritone Inc. (Nasdaq: VERI), the creator of the world’s first operating system for artificial intelligence, aiWARE™, today announced an agreement with Carson Entertainment Group (CEG) to use Veritone’s digital asset portal, Digital Media Hub, to archive and license clips from the Johnny Carson Show’s 30-year history. Veritone added Digital Media Hub to its product offerings through its acquisition of Wazee Digital in August 2018.
CEG is the television licensing company established by Johnny Carson in 1981 to control the rights to “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.” The entire Carson library of television episodes from 1962 through 1992 — 3,900 hours of programming — has been painstakingly cataloged, transcribed, and synced to timecodes for licensing through CEG. Digital Media Hub will provide an online, searchable platform for licensing and distributing these assets through the cloud to anyone with permission.
“We have 30 years of late-night television in our library, and after being off the air for 26 years now, there’s still a tremendous amount of demand for it, especially from the broadcast industry. As the industry evolves, we must evolve too,” said Jeff Sotzing, president, CEG. “Digital Media Hub takes large television and film libraries and makes them accessible — and will bring our company’s licensing operation into the here and now. The new platform will not only be great for our customers, but it will also make our business more visible and easier to find, which in turn will generate more sales.”
At CEG, Digital Media Hub will replace a 10-year-old online licensing platform that has served the company well but has not kept pace with customers’ evolving needs. The new Digital Media Hub will meet several key requirements, including accessibility across all platforms, a richer and more intuitive user experience, and more robust search capabilities.
With Digital Media Hub, licensed customers will be able to access the site, search and watch clips, make selections, and request pricing, all from a mobile device or the desktop. An all-new search experience will enable users to search across the entire video library for guests and phrases in a transcript, and find the clips that are most valuable to them, much faster and easier than the legacy system. A key improvement is an advanced and easy-to-use media player, which makes the process of marking specific points in a video clip smooth and precise.
“Being able to search a transcript of each show and find something very quickly is a major benefit of this search engine,” Sotzing said. “For example, if a client is doing a story about Michael Jackson, they can not only find the segments of the show that Michael Jackson performed on, but also go into the transcript and find out what people said about him during the show. For producers and researchers, that’s an invaluable tool.”
Veritone worked with CEG to configure the company’s new Digital Media Hub to their branding specs and migrate 75 terabytes of assets from the current CEG website to the new Digital Media Hub site.
“Digital Media Hub is the only turnkey product that delivers the user experience CEG requires, is fully configurable to their brand, and is cost-effective,” said Robin Melhuish, director of customer solutions for Veritone. “Through our platform, CEG and similar rights holders get a branded licensing portal that can be configured to fit their business needs. It offers an intuitive digital asset management portal in the cloud that makes it possible for rights holders to control and monetize their most valuable video assets directly.”