MASV – Who Is Troveo?
Troveo is a video licensing platform helping creators monetize unused footage: Content owners, creatives, basically anyone with unused video can license their content libraries for AI training. The company provides a new revenue stream for content owners, while enabling AI companies to develop high-quality, legally compliant content models.
Head of Growth Sarah Barrick was employee No. 4. “Before Troveo was called Troveo,” she says with a laugh. “We’re founded by a team of people who have been in the creator economy for a very long time, helping all kinds of creators monetize,” she explains. “That’s what we’ve based our entire careers on – how to get creators paid for their work. We entered the market with the goal of making sure that creators don’t get left out in the age of AI.”
Troveo Highlights:
- 2,400-plus licensors upload an average of 6,000 TBs every month.
- With 350M+ clips uploaded, content owners have received more than $5M in payouts.
- Founded in 2023 by former Vouch founder Marty Pesis, Troveo emerged from stealth in late 2024 with 20+ employees.
The Challenge: Ingesting thousands of TBs monthly
Troveo sells unused footage, from B-roll to home movies, to train AI models. It ingests a menagerie of content types, from 4K clips to celluloid reels from the late 1800s that need to be upscaled into high-resolution footage.
Fittingly, Troveo is now the world’s largest video network for AI training. “We ingest the data and process it to prepare it for AI training pipelines,” explains Head of Growth Sarah Barrick. “Then we deliver that to technology and AI companies.”
But as a technology startup, Troveo faced major challenges.
Challenge #1: Intuitive large-file transfer
Troveo required an intuitive upload solution for content owners with varying technical skills and language backgrounds. Complex tools like command line interfaces were not an option. With a lean team, managing numerous support queries in multiple languages about content ingestion was also infeasible.
Challenge #2: Fast, scalable, organized ingest
The breakneck pace of Troveo’s scale-up with both licensors and AI partners requires uploading a lot of content to the cloud fast to meet deal deadlines. Troveo also needed transparency along the data upload pipeline for users, and for all content to be organized by type once uploaded.
Challenge #3: Reliable transfers
A bad upload experience, failed transfers, or poor customer service could alienate licensors. The company needed a solution that could deliver a frictionless experience. “Many of these people had never had to do anything like this before,” says Barrick. “It was asking them to do something completely new.”
Challenge #4: Simple integrations and onboarding
Troveo needed easy integration with its Amazon S3 cloud storage bucket, so uploaded files would land in the right spot with minimal manual intervention. It also needed a fast, simple experience to onboard internal staff.
The Solution: MASV
After testing several solutions, Barrick says it soon became obvious that MASV was the missing piece. “When we found MASV, we knew it was something creators could use,” she says, adding that she and Troveo adviser and creator Peter Hollens initially helped research file transfer tools. “It was a no-brainer.”
Troveo ingests an average of 6,000 TB each month, typically file packages in the 300 to 500 gigabyte range, but sometimes more than a terabyte. Troveo now generates a private, secure MASV Portal for each content owner following contract signing; uploaders simply drag-and-drop files.
“The ultimate factor was the usability,” says Barrick. “It was just so easy for users – they didn’t even have to download a desktop client. They didn’t need any technical expertise, and could use a private, secure portal to begin uploading right away. ”
Troveo embedded browser-based Portal functionality into its proprietary user interface, ensuring a seamless upload experience:
- Users don’t need to learn technical language, execute code, or even watch tutorials.
- Users anywhere, even those with a significant language barrier, can leverage MASV’s simple user interface to start uploading right away.
- Troveo ingests from users from South Africa, Jamaica, Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia, Namibia, Algiers, Tunisia, Egypt, and more, including countries that only have power for a limited number of hours each day.
A fast, scalable way to receive and organize files
In speed tests, MASV is faster than Aspera, WeTransfer, Dropbox, and other platforms thanks in part to our accelerated network built on AWS infrastructure. Speed is crucial to meet deal deadlines with fast turnaround payouts.
Since Portals are unlimited and free to spin up, Troveo generates one MASV Portal per uploader. Content is automatically categorized based on a user’s contract.
“Their Portal link is already associated with their record as having cinematic footage or consumer-grade footage,” adds Barrick. “So it’s easy for us to quickly identify: ‘OK, this is a YouTuber with lifestyle content. Or this is a film production house with cinematic footage.’”
The result is well-organized footage and a transparent uploading experience, a must when ingesting content from thousands of different creators.
Creators don’t want to waste time monitoring their file transfers. Barrick says MASV has been an invaluable tool:
- A cloud buffer between sender and recipient ensures transfers won’t fail despite any problems on the recipient side (without impacting performance or speed).
- If there is an interruption, MASV’s relentless retries and checkpoint restart ensure the transfer always completes without starting over.
The Result: Massively fast ingest
MASV immediately helped Troveo solve its primary problem: Ingesting boatloads of content from disparate users, quickly and reliably under strict deadlines.
As for the creators themselves? Some of them have already pulled down five-figure incomes from working with Troveo.
“We’ve had creators and filmmakers reach out and tell us that this changed their life – that they can now pay for their daughter’s college education, and that this allows them to pursue their dreams.”
Read the full story here: https://massive.io/customer-stories/troveo/
