SVG Sit-Down: Inside Wasabi’s Egress-Fee-Free Cloud Offering with Mike Welts, Isabel Freedman

Michael Welts, Wasabi, chief marketing officer, and Isabel Freedman, Wasabi, Alliance marketing manager, media & entertainment, were at Sportel to help rights holders, leagues, and broadcasters understand how Wasabi’s egress-free approach to cloud storage and its AiR Intelligent Media Storage can make a difference in operations. They spoke with SVG about their latest developments, including a new partnership with ScorePlay.

What is your key messaging heading towards the end of 2025?

Welts: We’re just about storage. It’s not sexy, but the fact that we have artificial intelligence and a platform that can grab archived content from decades ago and instantly retrieve it out of storage is a very unique combination. For the most part people are agreeing that this belongs in the cloud for a lot of different reasons in terms of location, easy access, simplicity, but the risk is cost of getting access back to that data once it’s in the cloud because everybody charges egress except for us.

How do you pull off not charging egress fees?

Michael Welts, Wasabi, chief marketing officer, and Isabel Freedman, Wasabi, Alliance marketing manager, media & entertainment.

Welts: Believe it or not, there’s enough margin in how we built the software. When you build a cloud storage platform, typically dating way back to the very beginning of storage, the whole model is built on utilization rate. And so typically when a disc gets to about 40 to 45% of utilization, they introduce another disc so that the disc is never overwhelmed with data. But in the case of the cloud, all cloud storages systems except ours are built on an OS architecture. But ours is completely proprietary and uses over 90% of the disk space. So that 90% utilization allows us to use far less discs which makes it cheaper.

And then from a performance standpoint, because 90 plus percent of the disc space is being used, it allows you to actually read and write quicker because you don’t have a gap to wait for the next bytes of data.

It’s all about what we call the three Ps: Price, Performance, and Protection. But there is actually a fourth which is Predictability of knowing your costs because there are no egress fees. And some organizations also have to pay for outside consultants to go through cloud bills to figure out which department [or office] is responsible for what. But with Wasabi there are no additional hidden charges. And now look at how fast AI is coming because now it’s all about the more data you see, the more intelligent the platform is. You can make those decisions. Right?

Yes…so tell me a bit about your AI tagging.

Welts: We had a customer that started looking at a company called Curio who is ahead of its time on the AI side for storing and indexing video and ultimately being able to identify and pull fan moments from old stories. And we liked the technology so much, we said, okay, let’s buy that.

And now we just announced a deal with ScorePlay which will provide a front-end interface for our AiR (AI Recognition) tagging and search. So now we have cloud storage with AiR which indexes the video and then the ScorePlay front-end media asset management tool that brings us to a whole different level.

Freedman: Yes, with ScorePlay it’s up to the customer to bring their own storage and then ScorePlay helps manage all the media, distribute it, or even clip things. And the nice thing is the ScorePlay users’ metadata attaches to the cloud storage as we have an API for the storage and the Ai. And that means someone can start training an AI model within the end user’s control. And then the user can choose if they want to use facial recognition or speech to text…there’s a list of things.

And then there are things like making archive footage usable in case a logo can’t be used because of policies. With AiR we can find every time a logo shows up and then use generative Ai to put a new logo on top of the old one or cover it up. And that can allow an organization to turn an archive that is a sunk cost into something that can generate revenue.