Starchive

The Short Story: We built Starchive because Dropbox, Google Drive, and iCloud just don't work for us or the 50+ million creators who work with digital media every day. 

Bob Dylan was our first customer and we are pioneering a new category of technology combining cloud storage with critical functions for capitalizing on media, spanning both web2 and web3, and priced in a way to make swapping out your old simple cloud storage a no-brainer.

The Full Version: Media is the heart of modern culture and commerce. More than 95% of our daily interactions with goods, brands, and people are driven by rich media (photos, videos, gifs,) or multi-media (presentations, pdfs).

Starchive exists to unlock the latent value in digital media -

-through data, auto curation, robust tagging capabilities, and powerful AI so that you can always find what you need when you need it and maximize the value and experience of your digital media.

Media files are not like documents and legacy file sharing platforms like Dropbox and simple cloud storage like Google Drive just weren’t built for the complex challenges of media files.

Starchive combines key features from:

• Dropbox but optimized for media

• YouTube but private to your business and your fans

• WeTransfer but directly connected to your content and capable of streaming

• Google Photos but with AI that serves you, not exploits you

• OpenSea but private to you and your fans/community

• Patreon but leveraging the blockchain so you are 100% in control (coming soon) 

Why the Creator Economy?

The “creator economy” is really just a fancy way of talking about the new opportunities to create income (and even wealth) by sharing your passions and expertise with others who care about the same things via digital media.

If the pandemic taught us anything, it was how powerful digital media and experiences can be and how they redefine what it means to work, play, study, exercise, and even connect with others. 

Today, Creators have been forced to cobble together solutions using a handful of tools like YouTube, Dropbox, and WeTransfer etc. to get their content to their tribes but this sucks up a lot of creative time and energy and cuts down on their productivity.

We started with Creators because:

• we know them best,
• we have deep credibility in the space,
• they are the tip of the spear,
• they are always adopters of new technology,
• and creatives drive culture.
• Winning with Creators means the world will follow.

The Proof is in our Traction

To create CBS-TV’s “Interrogation”

A top Hollywood writer and executive producer needed a fast and reliable way to sift through thousands of images and documents related to a real-life crime for a new docu-drama series.

Using Starchive, his six-person writing team, spread around the world, was able to collect, share, and easily curate themes and episodes from hundreds of images and PDF’s. Starchive’s collection capabilities made it easy to collaborate on a groundbreaking non-linear series that sold to CBS All Access. 

Check out the trailer for the resulting series below:

Now - dozens of young filmmakers we have yet to hear about use Starchive in the same way through our partnership with

Since 2014, the Bob Dylan Music Company has been working with Starchive to catalog 60+ years of the Nobel Prize winner’s work. The work led to an industry-defining sale of the physical archive to the George Kaiser Family Foundation (GKFF) and the University of Tulsa. 

In 2022, the Bob Dylan Center opened in Tulsa, OK showcasing thousands of media assets sourced from Starchive and around the world.

“Bob Dylan Photos Revealed After 50 Years, Spurring Multi-Billion Archive Business”

• Forbes Magazine, 2016

Rising star Armani White's team started using Starchive in 2020 to capture all the exceptional content he creates every day in formats from his phone to social posts, to raw tracks from the studio. 

Just last month his top hit Billie Eilish went viral and he is on the move. Think about how powerful it will be to have his fans have access to ALL his content and outtakes as he rides the momentum to fame. 

Watch his video on YouTube

In 2020, when COVID caused the Annual ESSENCE Festival of Culture and the ESSENCE 50 Year Anniversary to go 100% virtual, Starchive processed 328,710 minutes (5,478.5 hours) of video for ESSENCE, tagging every celebrity along the timeline in each video in just 8 days, to empower the ESSENCE team to make ESSENCE Fest 2020 a huge success.

“This opened up a whole new world of the archive footage that we have, so now we want to use it more.” -Executive Producer - Essence

Click here to read the Amazon Web Services Case Study on this project.

Whether you are a Commercial Hero, a Cultural Hero, or a Community Hero - your media tells your story and it is important to your tribe. 

Read about more use cases from a Presidential Library, to a brewery, to a mindfulness business, and more at the bottom of this page.

See what our users say...

Why Blockchain?

Though we are in the very early days - it is clear that blockchain technologies enable brand new income streams and capabilities that get creators and fans closer together with fewer middlemen. This means a creator can make a decent living with a smaller tribe of passionate fans since they keep more of the value they create.

These technologies also make creators the owners of their communities where they get to set the terms and they get to own the audience. If one platform does not serve them any longer, they can take their fans and go elsewhere. This is a fundamental shift in the creator/fan relationship powered by blockchain.

Starchive makes it possible for a creator to use blockchain technology to create an NFT or digital collectible. This can be a digital piece of art or it can be a token that represents access to content or partial ownership in a future revenue stream.

Eventually, Starchive will make it possible for a creator to provide subscription access to content gated by blockchain tokens and even access to Metaverse experiences like a concert we recently helped the Jerry Garcia family host in Decentraland.

All these web3 activities, help us support a cutting-edge creator economy and generate additional revenue for Starchive.

The need for Starchive doesn’t stop with just Creators

Just take food for example A cursory search of the #food and #foodporn tags on Instagram will reveal millions of shots (168,422,776 posts and 76,245,234 posts, respectively) of meals, beverages, ingredients, and food makers.

This means that every restaurant, brewery, and cocktail bar now has a media problem too. You can swap out just about any industry and find the same thing.

Here are a handful of more real use cases from Starchive users, both in media and those using media to drive their business and build their brand.