BCCI Digital Archive Platform: How BRAHMA AI Moved 1 PB of Cricket History to the Cloud

About BCCI

The BCCI is the national governing body of cricket in India, headquartered in Mumbai. It is the wealthiest cricket board in the world and one of the sport's “Big Three,” alongside Cricket Australia and the England and Wales Cricket Board.

The BCCI oversees four squads that represent India in international cricket: the men's national team, the women's national team, and their respective under-19 teams. It also governs the developmental India A and India B sides, with a national selection committee, led by the chief national selector, responsible for choosing players across every squad.

The BCCI has hosted multiple ICC World Cups and is scheduled to host three more: the 2026 ICC T20 World Cup, the 2031 ICC ODI Cricket World Cup, and the 2025 Women's Cricket World Cup.

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The Challenge: Moving a Decade of Cricket Archives Off Physical Tape

BCCI has preserved Indian cricket footage through its archive services since 2008, when it began storing content in a physical LTO 6 tape library at its Mumbai premises. The setup used a 1+1 redundancy model: one copy held on-site in the tape library, and a second LTO 6 copy externalized to a third-party disaster recovery (DR) site.

To modernize this operation, BCCI set out to build a fully cloud-based digital archive platform. Its key objectives were to:

• Use public cloud infrastructure for long-term digital storage
• Maintain geo-redundant copies of all archived content
• Upgrade existing capabilities with faster turnaround times and greater productivity in archive operations
• Extend its event-highlights VoD package creation into the new digital archive platform, creating operating synergies between archiving and content production

BCCI selected BRAHMA AI as its partner to design and deliver the software and services this transformation required. Building the new platform meant solving several challenges tied to how the existing archive was structured and stored:

• 350,000 BCCI-copyrighted images held on a third-party SFTP server, along with their associated metadata
• ~1 PB of video content from tournaments and matches, stored in a physical location
• Matches ingested in parts: for example, the first and second innings of an ODI are separate assets, and each day of a Test match may be its own asset
• Ball-by-ball metadata, with roughly 120 parameters describing every single ball bowled
• A 4-month deadline to migrate all of this content without disruption

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The Solution: BRAHMA AI Core on Microsoft Azure

BRAHMA AI brought its media & entertainment (M&E) domain expertise to design a migration strategy built around two components: BRAHMA AI Core, the same platform deployed for BRAHMA AI's global media clients, and Microsoft Azure as the cloud infrastructure partner.

Together, these formed the foundation of a cloud-native digital archive platform for BCCI, one designed to move content from the ground to the cloud while preserving every piece of metadata and file format along the way. BRAHMA AI deployed a dedicated team of experts to design the best-fit approach for each content type in the archive.

Migrating 350,000 Archival Images

BCCI's 350,000 images were held on an SFTP server managed by a third-party vendor. Because direct access to the server presented challenges, BRAHMA AI and BCCI agreed on an alternate path: the vendor moved the source images to an Azure Blob Storage location, and BRAHMA AI's team then transferred them from there into a BRAHMA AI-hosted Blob location.

Once the transfer was complete, BRAHMA AI verified the target files against the source list to confirm accurate naming conventions, matching checksums, and complete indexing. BRAHMA AI Core then retrieved the source metadata, maintained in the IPTC taxonomy, directly from the image files and indexed it, making every image searchable and discoverable inside the platform.

Migrating ~1 PB of Match Footage with Azure Databox

All of BCCI's video content lived on LTO tapes at an on-premise location in Mumbai. BRAHMA AI first restored this content to temporary storage, analyzing both the time required and the storage capacity needed to process the full archive.

After evaluating several approaches, BRAHMA AI's customer-centric strategy pointed to Azure Databox as the best fit for the job. With BCCI targeting a full migration in under four months, Databox offered the most secure and reliable method for transferring content at this scale: quickly, cost-effectively, and without straining bandwidth. BRAHMA AI used multiple Databox units to move the archive out of Mumbai and into the cloud.

BRAHMA AI Core managed the entire data-loading process, running scripts that transferred content from on-premise storage onto the Azure Databox units. Once loaded, the Databoxes were shipped to the nearest Azure data centers, where the content became automatically available in Azure Blob Storage. From there, BRAHMA AI Core handled the tiered movement of content from Blob to Cold Blob storage using its built-in storage policy management.

The entire migration was completed in under four months and covered every major content type in BCCI's archive:

• Domestic matches
• Test matches
• ODI matches
• T20 matches
• Other formats

In total, more than 16,000 matches (roughly 1 PB of content) were migrated to the cloud. BRAHMA AI Core retained the ball-by-ball metadata for every match and preserved the original tape-part structure, keeping the content fully searchable inside the platform's UI.

Content Analytics and Reporting

BRAHMA AI Core gives BCCI's operations and executive teams complete visibility into the archive through a suite of analytics and reports, generated directly from BCCI's data lake. These include dedicated archive and migration reports, all powered by Microsoft Power BI.

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