By buying iMemories, Ancestry is betting on a future where DNA, old home videos, and AI create personalized family films.

Home-movies-and-photos digitizer service iMemories was scooped up by genealogy company Ancestry, a bet by the ancestry giant that subscribers who already spend their money on DNA kits and pour their time into building family trees will be further enticed by visual storytelling that weaves all those details together.

The transaction will merge Ancestry, with more than 3.7 million subscribers and $1 billion in annual subscription revenue, with iMemories, which bills itself as the “Netflix” of old family memories, with more than 100,000 paying subscribers and has digitized more than 100 million VHS videotapes, photo prints, DVDs, and other video formats over the past 20 years. IMemories was also named to the 2023 list of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies.

“The goal is to bring all family storytelling together into one spot,” Howard Hochhauser, Ancestry’s president and CEO, tells Fast Company in an interview.

Terms of the transaction weren’t disclosed, although Hochhauser says it is Ancestry’s largest acquisition in terms of revenue.

STITCHING TOGETHER RECORDS AND MEMORY 
With its integration of iMemories’ content into the Ancestry platform, the enlarged company will expand on a strategy already championed by Hochhauser to connect 10,000 terabytes of Ancestry data on the nitty-gritty of birth records, marriages, deaths, military service, and immigration with archival family photos and videos.

In the future, Ancestry says it will lean on artificial intelligence to stitch together video clips from iMemories and Ancestry’s own user-uploaded trove of archival materials, along with AI-generated images, to create short films that tell the tales of family lore.

“When a consumer sees a photo versus say, a U.S. census, they retain better, higher engagement, higher retention,” says Hochhauser, who joined Ancestry in 2009 as chief financial officer and has served in an executive capacity at the company for the initial public offering in 2009, a going-private transaction in 2012, and the 2020 sale to asset manager Blackstone.“Visual content is compelling, much more so than reading a document.”

TURNING PARCHED RECORDS INTO AUDIO VISUALS 
This week, and separate from the iMemories deal, Ancestry is also rolling out a beta AI-enabled pilot program to 500 users that can generate audio files from the documents uploaded to Ancestry. Hochhauser says these assets can be a gateway for younger consumers especially.

He recounts how his own 18-year-old son wasn’t too keen to read about an ancestor who fought in World War II. But when the text was converted into audio, Hochhauser says his son was on the edge of his seat when he got to the part of the tale that featured a great uncle in battle, where he talks about lobbing grenades at the enemy and the Purple Heart that he received as a result of his bravery. “That’s pretty powerful,” Hochhauser says. “And so that’s the direction we are taking the company.”

Hochhauser says before the iMemories deal, Ancestry had conducted research that found 40% of its users said they wanted the company to offer a digitization and storage service. It also found a third of non-Ancestry users expressed a similar wish.

AI SPEEDS DIGITIZATION OF HISTORICAL RECORDS 
AI is also already being leaned on by Ancestry to speed the digitization of census records. Back in 2012, when the U.S. Census Bureau first released files for every living person in the country that were taken in the year 1940, it took Ancestry nine months and millions of dollars to digitize all that information. But when the government agency released the 1950 files in 2022, technology had advanced to the point where Ancestry could employ computer vision and AI to transcribe those files in nine days without any manual labor.

The company is using AI in a similar way to parse through records from France, Belgium, and other foreign markets as it looks to speed up the work of digitization.

CONCERNS ABOUT PRIVACY ALSO LOOM 
The Ancestry-iMemories transaction does come at a time of heightened consumer concern over the data privacy of personal DNA information held by genomics companies. The 2023 data breach of rival 23andMe, which later went bankrupt, inflamed fears over who would end up with control of genetic information if one of these genealogy companies went belly up.

“People’s confidence has been shaken, in Big Tech overall, and also in consumer genomics,” says Dr. Brandon Colby, the founder and CEO of Sequencing.com, a biotech company that does whole genome sequencing.“The need to be extra obvious about transparency is really important.There’s no room for people to go and assume that we’re trying to do something shady.”

Sequencing is big on transparency in telling consumers of its “Privacy Forever” commitment to never sell any data to pharma companies, government agencies, or other outside parties, which is how some genomics companies have made money.

Colby says Sequencing makes money from monthly subscriptions and by selling reports it produces based on genome sequencing that can show consumers how they might react to medications, or offer advice on better sleep or nutrition strategies.

Hochhauser at Ancestry makes a similar pledge around DNA. Users control their own biological samples and DNA data, and have the freedom to delete that information from the service if they like. The same approach will be applied with AI-related content that is generated from iMemories data. It’s up to users how they want to share it, he says.

“We are a family history company,” Hochhauser says. “Consumers own their data, control their data, and we have multifactor authentication, as an example, and lots of different security protocols in place to protect and preserve data.”