This AI Company Is About to Save True-Crime Filmmakers a Lot of Time

There’s no shortage of true-crime content on streamers these days. The popular genre is inexpensive to produce and compelling to view, and a new documentary or documentary series always seems to worm its way into the zeitgeist.

For these documentarians, Court TV controls a treasure trove of valuable footage — it can just be a real pain in the ass to comb through. Enter Veritone, a tech company with an AI content-management system that is about to become a true-crime filmmaker’s best friend.

Veritone will manage, organize, and newly monetize Court TV‘s “enormous” (the channel’s own word) archive of legal content and trial coverage. The library dates back to Court TV’s founding way back in 1991 — there are thousands of hours of footage here.

Through Veritone’s Digital Media Hub (DMH), Court TV will make its archives available and easily searchable to whomever it grants access, be that affiliate network stations, media professionals, legal institutions, filmmakers, or podcasters. It is efficiency at its finest — something the legal system itself is unfamiliar with.

Even for famous legal cases, trial coverage can be difficult to track down and license. Much of Court TV’s content could have been accessible previously, but not necessarily available for licensing. By instead licensing out the library as a whole, the Veritone DMH system could better monetize the Court TV’s vault, reaching a wider audience — in turn, subscribing filmmakers will be able to find what they need much faster.

“Consumer interest in the real-life drama of true-crime programming is at an all-time high and the Court TV library is enormous, containing thousands of hours of coverage and footage from the nation’s biggest cases over the past 30 years,” said Ethan Nelson, head of Court TV. “We believe Veritone’s Digital Media Hub and Content Licensing solutions will help us pursue and unlock new opportunities for monetization of the library and make the content even more accessible to audiences and partners alike.”

Court TV maintains ownership of its archive; Veritone gets a licensing fee from Court TV for managing the content and dealing with any licensing Court TV wishes to do for its content. No deal terms were disclosed.

The Digital Media Hub stores everything in a cloud; AI organizes it into a searchable form to find specific moments. Veritone has previously built out similar archives for ESPN, CBS News, the NCAA, and CNN.