SVG Sit-Down: Veritone's Sean King on the Power of Mining Video, Audio DataThe company's Data Refinery offers users total control and governance over data assetsBy Ken Kerschbaumer Friday, December 5, 2025 - 7:00 am
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Lots of companies are talking about AI and its role in the sports-media landscape, but Veritone is one of the leaders when it comes to deals, with organizations like the Masters, the USTA, and the NCAA on board as clients. Veritone Chief Revenue Officer/GM, Commercial, Sean King leads all sales and marketing activities for the organization, in addition to overseeing the Commercial division, including SaaS technologies and managed services. He sat down with SVG to discuss key market trends, the Veritone tech stack, and much more.
Veritone's Sean King is looking forward to a busy 2026 with the Winter Olympics and the World Cup.
From a Veritone perspective, what have been some of the key milestones of the past year?
Our Data Refinery, which is where we're helping all our customers in both the commercial and public sector, [gain] total control and governance over their data assets, specifically their unstructured data, all their audio and video.
As we're ingesting all the footage - either onsite or remote - we're taking that content, making it structured, making it searchable, and helping them have the necessary governance. If they want to take their assets and make them available for search and discovery to be licensed for secondary and tertiary use cases or if they want to use that data to build an internal workflow or model or even make that data licensable to other companies, it allows us to give them a view into all their data, structured or unstructured, and the necessary tools to govern, to monetize, or to manage it.
In terms of data, there are the stats - lineups, things like that - that are input into video files. Then there's the audio track with announcers, captioning information, and, of course, facial recognition and object tracking. When you look at that ocean of data, what kind of stuff boils up and makes the most sense?
Specifically, we look at everything that's in the audio and video. We look at third-party data, from Stats Perform or Sports Radar, that we can time-correlate to what's taking place. But, for us, it's everything that's taking place on screen, whether it be face, logo, or objects.
You could say, Okay, let me find an image of Tiger Woods in a red Nike shirt and let there be an image of a Rolex in the background. We search through all those [images] and find what meets that multivariant search criteria. It's about giving that frame-by-frame annotation of everything on the screen or in the recording, and, if someone wants to marry that with those third-party data sources, you have the total flexibility to do so.
One of the challenges, obviously, is to manage archives and begin the process of digitizing things. What is your advice for someone who hasn't begun the journey? Even colleges, universities, and high schools are looking at what they should be doing. What are your tips?
It's a great question, and I think you've got to look at it two-fold. I always like to give the analogy of driving your car. The first thing you have to do is pay attention to what's in the windshield in front of you. Everything that's coming at me: how am I going to make sure that, as I'm going forward, I'm capturing everything? Making sure that I have all the control, all the data, and all the monetization opportunities - that's step one.
Step two is, Okay, now let me look in my rearview mirror and let me see all the places that I've sat before. The catch-up, especially the digitization, can be a time-consuming and costly endeavor. Start with the high-value, high-touch ones like the big historical moments. Once you start there, you can see the monetization opportunities and let those opportunities fund the catch-up of the rest.
It's also important to realize it's not just an opportunity; it's the preservation of history. Pretty soon, things I watched in the late '70s and early '80s won't be watchable under traditional means. The Betamaxes and VHSes are going the way of the dodo very soon. There won't be the physical ability to look at these things, so start with your high-value, high-touch, the ones that you know and just go from there.
Last week, I heard someone on stage at an event say that, if you're overwhelmed with all these tapes sitting in a facility somewhere, just get rid of them. Do you agree with that? Should leagues or teams say, You know what, there are some things that it's just not worth the effort of digitizing, so let's just let it go ? Is that too crazy?
It's provocative, I will say that. Using the phone analogy, I know my photos are backed up to my iCloud or my OneDrive. I have ways to do it. So I would say I am not a fan of saying, Throw it away. Before you take that step, make sure you know everything that you at least have, because so much of the value is not necessarily in content known but in what you don't know.
Content is being monetized in new ways; social-media platforms want different types of content. How do you see the explosion of monetization opportunities around archives and this content going forward? How is that landscape changing?
For us and our partners, it has been great. People's thirst for content has not gone down, and how people are consuming content has radically changed. You don't have two social-media apps; you have 10, and it's both an opportunity and a challenge. The opportunity is monetization, but you have to meet your customers where your viewers are now. You have to be able to find, distribute, and track the conten
