Versos AI + Tape Ark: Turning Decades of Dormant Video into Training Data for AI World Models

Today we're announcing a strategic partnership with Tape Ark, a global leader in large-scale media digitization, to unlock one of the world's largest and least accessible sources of AI training video: the billions of hours of footage still sitting on physical tape.

It's a partnership built for where AI is headed. As frontier labs continue to move beyond language models toward world models, the appetite for high-quality, real-world video has become effectively infinite.

For decades, broadcasters, studios, governments, scientific institutions, and enterprises have archived their most valuable footage on tape. That footage, news broadcasts, wildlife expeditions, sports archives, industrial recordings, cultural performances, scientific observations and more; represents a uniquely rich record of the physical world which is exactly what AI builders need to train their models.

"Companies are paying between $0.40 and $1.20 per tape per month just to store content on a shelf," said Guy Holmes, CEO of Tape Ark. "Many are spending millions of dollars holding on to content that's largely inaccessible, practically unusable and degrading every day."

Tape Ark has already processed more than an exabyte of data globally, including over 200 petabytes of video; roughly 29 million hours of high-quality 4K-equivalent footage.

An End-to-End Pipeline for Turning Legacy Video into Licensable Data

Tape Ark digitizes and migrates analog and legacy tape-based video into the cloud at industrial scale. Versos AI then takes it from there, transforming unstructured video archives into structured, searchable, rights-cleared data that's ready for library holders to license for AI training. The result is a clean, compliant dataset that can be purchased, licensed, or integrated into a customer's training pipeline, without the content owner ever having to build that infrastructure themselves.

"The future of AI training data is video, and much of it is still trapped on tape," said Chris Keevill, CEO of Versos AI. "This partnership with Tape Ark creates a direct pipeline to unlock that footage, and transform it into structured, usable data for AI systems."

"Once those tapes are digitized and moved to the cloud, it can be stored for a fraction of a cent — and more importantly, it becomes usable," Holmes said. "Instead of paying to store it, organizations can start monetizing it as AI training data."

That's the part we're most excited about. An archive that used to be a recurring cost line becomes a recurring revenue line. And the rights stay with the owner at every step — Versos handles the structuring, discovery, and licensing, but the content itself remains under the control of the people who created and preserved it.

We're actively working with high-quality video library owners who have tape-based archives they'd like to bring online and monetize, and with AI developers looking for specific, rights-cleared video datasets for training.

Learn more about our partnership here.