Case Study: NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory achieves instant, searchable access to archived videos with Microsoft Azure Media Indexer

Keeping Ideas Alive with Space-Age Media Solution

The NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), a Caltech-managed center with about 5,000 employees, faced a knowledge-access challenge: tens of thousands of hours of recorded talks and roughly 2,000 archived videos on JPLTube were difficult to search, only accessible onsite, and time-consuming to use for training and research. Important lessons and presentations were effectively locked away, limiting discoverability and accessibility for staff and blind researchers.

JPL adopted Microsoft’s Audio Video Indexing Service (MAVIS), now Azure Media Indexer in Azure Media Services, to auto-transcribe, caption, index, and make video content searchable. Staff can upload recordings from phones to the cloud, retrieve multimedia and transcripts in seconds, and access training remotely. The result: far faster searches and reduced training time, daily uploads of new content (often 20 videos/day), a prototype NASATube for broader agency use, and a preserved, searchable archive that keeps ideas alive.

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory