Unlock the Footage: Global Media Intelligence Hackathon
Most organizations are sitting on footage that contains answers they can't access.
A sports team with five seasons of match recordings and no way to query them. A compliance team manually scrubbing hours of safety walkthroughs every week. A newsroom that knows a clip exists in their archive but can't surface it without watching hours of broadcast. A broadcaster with a library of content that takes weeks to localize for a new market. An ed tech platform with thousands of recorded lectures that students can't search through. A company with years of meeting recordings that no one can query.
The footage exists. The intelligence is locked inside it.
This 48-hour global online hackathon is for builders who want to unlock it. Build an agent that turns archived video or audio into structured, searchable, actionable intelligence — using real footage, not synthetic data.
🏆 PRIZES
$1,200 — Winner
$800 — Runner-up
📅 KEY DATES
Hackathon opens: July 25, 2026 — 10:00 AM IST
Hackathon closes: July 27, 2026 — 10:00 AM IST
🛠 WHAT TO BUILD
Build anything that extracts meaningful intelligence from real archived video or audio. Your project must use VideoDB's stack to ingest, index, search, or act on footage in a way that produces something genuinely useful.
A few directions worth exploring:
— Sports archive analysis: post-match breakdown agents, player performance retrieval over a season, historical clip search on demand
— News and media archive retrieval: systems that make broadcast archives searchable and surface exact moments with playable evidence
— Compliance and content safety: auditors that scan footage against rules, flag violations, and return timestamped evidence clips
— Broadcast and OTT workflows: pipelines that automate dubbing, clipping, localization, or highlight generation from existing content libraries
— Ed tech and learning archives: agents that make recorded lectures searchable, generate chapter summaries, surface key moments on demand, or create personalized study clips
— Meeting and conversation archives: systems that turn recorded meetings into queryable knowledge bases, surface decisions, action items, or exact moments from months of recordings
These are directions, not constraints. If your build uses real archived media and produces actionable intelligence through VideoDB, it qualifies.
All hackathon participants will receive enough credits to build their use cases. The claim link will be shared before the hackathon starts. Meanwhile, explore VideoDB with $20 free credits — no credit card required → https://console.videodb.io
Browse what's been built for inspiration → videodb.io/showcase
Full SDK docs → docs.videodb.io
📐 JUDGING CRITERIA
Technical execution — 40%
Creativity & originality — 30%
Depth of VideoDB usage — 30%
Judges are practitioners active in media tech and AI agent infrastructure. Profiles shared in Discord before the hackathon starts.
📦 SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS
All submissions must include:
— A working demo using real archived media (actual video or audio files — no synthetic data or mocked output)
— A public GitHub repository
— A short description (200 words max) of what you built and how VideoDB is used
Submissions missing any of these will be disqualified before reaching judges.
👤 WHO SHOULD APPLY
Solo builders preferred — teams of two permitted. Both judged by identical criteria.
Built for AI engineers, media tech builders, sports data developers, broadcast engineers, and anyone working with video or audio as operational data.
You will need a VideoDB API key — sent on RSVP confirmation.
💬 DISCORD
All coordination, support, and judging happen on the VideoDB Discord server. Link sent on RSVP confirmation. The team is live throughout the 48 hours.
📋 ELIGIBILITY
— Open globally
— Solo preferred; teams of two permitted
— One submission per participant or team
— Employees of VideoDB are not eligible
Full terms and conditions available on RSVP confirmation.
RSVP to get your API key, Discord invite, and submission dashboard access. Everything you need to start building will be in your inbox.