Skip the proxy farms, the bot-detection cat-and-mouse, and the legal grey zones. We hand you the videos, the metadata, the hashes, and the audit trail — straight into your S3, GCS or Azure bucket.
Trusted for AI training-data ingestion, OSINT investigations, and brand-intel programs. SOC 2 in progress. EU/US data residency. No public scraping endpoints — we work white-glove.
Trusted by data and intelligence teams at
Three problems that always show up when you try to get YouTube video at scale on your own.
Modern bot detection (TLS fingerprinting via JA3/JA4, behavioral analysis, rolling cipher) breaks naive yt-dlp pipelines. Datacenter proxies are dead. Residential proxies cost real money and rotate poorly. Your engineers spend more time fighting CAPTCHAs than building product.
You don't just want the file. You want metadata (channel, upload date, view counts at capture time), captions, thumbnails, comment snapshots, and — increasingly — a cryptographic chain of custody so the file holds up in court or in an AI-data audit.
In Jan 2026 a US federal magistrate ruled that YouTube's rolling cipher counts as DMCA §1201 access control. Active lawsuits target Amazon (Nova Reel) and OpenAI for video scraping. Your General Counsel won't sign off on a one-person script. They will sign off on a vendor with an Acceptable Use Policy, DPA, and a real entity behind it.
You give us the brief — a list of URLs, a channel, a search query, a topic. We do the rest.
Capture the video at the highest available quality, plus all metadata, captions, comments and thumbnails.
Generate SHA-256 hashes, RFC 3161 timestamps, technical fingerprints, and (optional) face-blur, language tags, ASR transcripts.
Drop everything directly into your S3, GCS, Azure or SFTP, with structured filenames and a JSON manifest.
Keep monitoring channels and topics; new content lands in your bucket as it's published, with the same metadata + hash treatment.
You get an Engineer-to-Engineer Slack/email line for any oddball edge case. No tickets, no support queues.
Each use case has its own delivery format, compliance level and SLA. Pick yours.
After the OpenAI and Amazon Nova Reel lawsuits, "we wrote a script" is not a defensible answer. "We engaged a vendor with a documented compliance pipeline" is.
yt-dlp at scale is a never-finished project. We take that operational pain off the table.
No major-label music for commercial reuse. No unlicensed sports / film. No content opted out by the rights holder. Customer warrants right to use under their licensing terms.
A written methodology document for every dataset — selection criteria, source filtering, anti-bias measures, opt-out handling, retention and destruction. The exact document AI buyers ask for after the 2025 lawsuits.
SHA-256 hash + RFC 3161 timestamp from independent TSA. HTTP-level provenance log. Immutable storage. Auto-affidavit PDF. Aligned with ISO/IEC 27037 and 27042.
EU customers — EU regions only. US customers — US regions. No cross-border transfers without explicit DPA. SOC 2 Type 1 in progress (Q3). ISO 27001 on roadmap.
All customer data encrypted in transit (TLS 1.3) and at rest (AES-256). Customer-controlled IAM credentials for delivery. Zero customer files retained on our infra longer than necessary. Vulnerability disclosure: responsible@stormkeep.io.
We're not the right tool for everyone. Here's how we compare to common alternatives.
| If you need… | Better fit | Why not StormKeep |
|---|---|---|
| A free CLI to download one video | yt-dlp | We start at $5K. Use yt-dlp. |
| A pay-per-call API for ad-hoc requests | Bright Data / Oxylabs / Apify | We don't sell self-service or per-call API. We're managed. |
| A SaaS dashboard for social listening | Brandwatch / Talkwalker | We supply files and chain of custody, not analytics dashboards. |
| A licensed video library for EdTech curriculum | Boclips | We work with content beyond their library, but with customer-warranted rights. |
| Forensic-grade capture of YouTube video at scale | StormKeep | — |
| Video data delivered into your AI training pipeline | StormKeep | — |
| Continuous topic monitoring with full files in your bucket | StormKeep | — |
No usage-based surprises, no metered billing on tiny units. Quarterly or annual contracts, paid in USD wire or USDC.
We are not lawyers, and the law in this area is genuinely complex. Here is what we can say:
If you want to discuss compliance for your specific case before signing — that's exactly what the discovery call is for.
We ingest video data using publicly observable techniques. We don't bypass paywalls, we don't access private content, and we don't decrypt premium streams. We use residential and mobile proxies and an unlocker layer for sticky bot-detection cases — the same infrastructure layer used by Bright Data, Oxylabs, Apify and other enterprise web-data vendors.
Many teams do, and many succeed for a while. Then YouTube ships a bot-detection update, your pipeline breaks at 2 AM the night before a model launch, and one of your engineers spends a week debugging TLS fingerprints instead of working on your product. We employ that engineer. You don't have to. There's also the legal-defensibility argument: "we wrote a script" reads differently in a deposition than "we engaged a vendor with a documented compliance pipeline".
Yes — that's the default. We write directly into your S3 / GCS / Azure bucket using IAM credentials that you control and can rotate. We don't keep customer files longer than we have to.
You warrant your right to use the content. We provide source-filtering options (Creative Commons only, opted-in only, owned content only) when that fits your compliance posture. For OSINT and legal use, fair use and lawful authority apply. We don't take engagements that look like piracy or unlicensed commercial reuse of major IP.
Yes, at the enrichment step. Useful for GDPR-sensitive deliveries.
Yes. Watch lists are part of Growth, Scale and Enterprise plans. New videos matching your topic / channel / keyword land in your bucket within minutes of publication, with the same metadata and hash treatment as ingest deliveries.
Yes, USDC (preferred) or BTC. Many of our customers prefer wire transfer because their finance team is comfortable with it; we make both available.
We have an internal API. We don't make it public — managed deliveries are our product, and API resale invites a different category of customer than we're built for. If you need a public API, Bright Data and Oxylabs are good options.
7–14 days from signed pilot to delivery, depending on volume and complexity.
Yes. Largest single delivery to date: [TBD — fill once first big customer ships]. Our infrastructure scales horizontally; the constraint is usually your storage budget, not ours.
For OSINT and legal customers we set up monitoring on the target URL and capture as soon as it's posted. If a video is deleted before we can capture, we attempt recovery from Wayback Machine and other web archives. We don't guarantee recovery, but our hit rate on recently-deleted content is high.
We do not deliver to or from sanctioned jurisdictions. We operate within US, EU, UK, Canada, Australia, Japan, Singapore, UAE and similar.
Your data is in your bucket. You don't lose anything if we disappear. For Enterprise plans we provide source-code escrow for the ingestion pipeline so you can self-host on a transition path if needed.
Soon. If you have deep yt-dlp / scraping infrastructure expertise, drop us a note at hiring@stormkeep.io.
A 20-minute walkthrough. We'll show how a real customer's pipeline runs end-to-end. You walk out with a sized quote and either a clear "yes, let's pilot" or a clear "no, here's why we're not the fit".