Education Media Company Streamlining Media Storage and Archiving

The company is a public information officer for a mid-sized school district with four schools and just over 3,000 students. The district is recognized for its high standards and strong community expectations. The communications team regularly produces and disseminates multimedia content such as press releases, social media posts, and videos to showcase daily achievements and foster community engagement.

The company currently manages a large volume of media assets stored on-premises, including approximately 800 terabytes of NAS storage. Photographs and videos are taken during school events, edited locally on SSDs, and then shared via cloud services such as Google Photos, leveraging unlimited district Google storage for broader distribution. The district has recently partnered with an archival company to digitize over 3,000 historical tapes dating back to the 1940s, which are currently stored on a 300-terabyte NAS system.

A significant challenge arises from privacy and legal compliance related to student images. Approximately 150 students have opted out of being photographed or filmed for public dissemination, requiring manual review and exclusion from every photo and video, a highly time-consuming and labor-intensive process. Additionally, the company faces concerns about managing and accessing a vast archive of historical footage, which contains valuable content including interviews with notable figures and alumni. Current storage and retrieval methods are inefficient, and scaling the system to leverage AI-based indexing and facial recognition is a cost concern, particularly with large volumes of data.

Shade’s AI-powered platform offers advanced facial recognition and media tagging capabilities that can automate the identification and exclusion of students who have opted out of publicity, drastically reducing manual review efforts. The company envisions a phased implementation starting with using Shade’s solution to manage photo releases and ensure compliance with privacy policies. Subsequent phases include migrating portions of their on-premises NAS storage to Shade’s cloud infrastructure and integrating AI tagging for their extensive archival footage. Shade’s tiered pricing and archive storage solutions would enable the company to maintain a fully searchable media library with natural language search capabilities, improving access to historic content while controlling costs.