NEVADA CITY, Calif., and CENTENNIAL, Colo.—Telestream DIVA content management platform is now certified for use with the Quantum ActiveScale object storage platform and will be jointly demonstrated in the Quantum booth at the 2026 NAB Show, April 18-22, in Las Vegas.

The certification, which includes use Quantum ActiveScale integrated Cold Storage tier, enables media organizations to combine DIVA’s proven, policy-driven archive workflows with an on-premises object storage platform. Quantum ActiveScale is designed to deliver extreme durability, lower power and cooling costs and streamlined management to support long-term preservation at petabyte scale.

The certification also expands the relationship between the companies, building on existing certification of Quantum StorNext and interoperability with Telestream solutions, such as Vantage.

Media companies are now generating and retaining more content than ever, creating pressure to archive everything safely, affordably and sustainably. As the value of this content grows and libraries expand across sports, broadcast, production and streaming operations, organizations rely on DIVA’s lifecycle and policy management to keep archives structured, searchable and ready for reuse.

But protecting and retaining vast collections for decades also requires storage that is power-efficient, cost-effective, and secure at petabyte scale. With cloud costs rising and long-term content value increasing, organizations are seeking modern, on-premises S3 object storage with predictable economics and sustainable preservation.

The combined Telestream-Quantum solution provides a modern foundation for sports organizations, broadcasters, production companies, post facilities and enterprises managing long-term video libraries. With DIVA now certified across all ActiveScale tiers, users can build archives that:

• Scale from terabytes to multiple petabytes and beyond.
• Maintain consistent DIVA workflows across on-premises and cloud-based S3 tiers.
• Use a unified API-driven archive strategy to simplify ingest, retention, and retrieval.
• Preserve aging or at-risk library assets in a cost-efficient form factor.
• Avoid unpredictable cloud egress fees while retaining cloud-like flexibility.

Telestream has certified all active versions of DIVA with ActiveScale and ActiveScale Cold Storage using Quantum’s S3 API. The certification covers archiving, retrieval, metadata management and policy-driven lifecycle operations across local and hybrid archive environments. Both companies have validated interoperability and offer coordinated support for customers deploying the integrated solution.

Live demonstrations will be conducted at NAB booth N1726.

More information is available on the Telestream and Quantum websites.

TORONTO—Eon Media, WCTE Central Tennessee PBS and Public Media Venture Group (PMVG) have announced a pilot project to evaluate the potential of Eon Media’s eonArchivesAI product to enhance programming, enrich local service and raise additional revenue in a local public television environment.

As part of the pilot, Eon Media with the assistance of PMVG will work with WCTE PBS, serving rural Tennessee, to deploy the product to index extensive WCTE archives using AI-generated metadata, PMVG said.

WCTE’s archives include years of public events, public service programming, cultural features and local sports. While the station has digitized much of its archives, the lack of any metadata encoding or indexing has presented a virtually insurmountable obstacle to WCTE’s ability to leverage these archives, it said.

The potential to create new programming or enhance current programming, to identify material that may have value to local government or public service organizations or to generate license revenue from archives is a significant opportunity for the station. The WCTE pilot will provide this metadata indexing, a user interface to extract content and a public-facing online storefront to allow interested parties to identify and license material that might be of interest to them, it said.

Eon Media has a successful record with commercial broadcasters. These efforts have enabled the company’s broadcast customers to generate over $50,000 in revenue in the past six months—a sum that excludes the value of leveraging archives in news reporting, creating nonbroadcast content offshoots and other benefits that add to the value of the stations, it said.

The pilot will help EON Media and PMVG identify challenges and opportunities unique to local public television stations and determine what features public television stations need to derive the most value from their archives. The pilot will also help stations develop and augment policies for responsible, ethical and journalistic uses of AI as well as respond to potential concerns of donors and the general public about stations’ use of AI.

More information is available on the Eon Media, PMVG and WCTE Central Tennessee PBS websites.

The Associated Press has launched a new multiformat AI-powered content delivery platform designed to make it easier for users to find and use the news organization’s vast collection of visual, audio and text content.

The AP Newsroom platform offers a redesigned interface and wide range of new and enhanced features, AP said. They include AI-powered search and content recommendations, as well as intuitive navigation and customizable homepages to make the user experience faster and easier than ever before.

In launching the improvements, the AP said that the site underscores its commitment to delivering digital, visual-first media and serving the needs of its members and customers in a rapidly evolving media environment.

“The all-new AP Newsroom is a truly user-centric platform that provides seamless access to AP’s rich portfolio of all-formats journalism,” said Kristin Heitmann, AP senior vice president and chief revenue officer. “This marks an important milestone in our efforts to help customers quickly get the content they need, jump on breaking news faster than ever before and uncover new angles on stories – all in service of being able to serve their own readers and audiences.”

The AP described the new and enhanced features as follows:

• “Storylines,” a new tool powered by Storytelling AI from ShortTok that makes it easy to discover curated video and photo content organized around key themes and stories. For instance, when Pope Francis returned to the Vatican after his hospitalization, Storylines surfaced adjacent themes like public reaction and recovery updates to help users explore every angle.
• “More Like This,” also from ShortTok, which leverages AI to display visually similar and contextually relevant related content.
• Customizable homepages that allow users to focus on the topics, regions and formats that matter most to them.
• Access to content in AP’s exclusive historical archives, which contain more than a century’s worth of award-winning, rare and high-quality content.
• Breaking news alerts now with audio alerting, offering real-time updates on the latest stories as they unfold.

More information is available here.

DENVER—Veritone has renewed and expanded its lonstanding exclusive global licensing agreement with CBS News to also include exclusive local news content from CBS-owned stations.

For more than a decade, CBS News and Veritone’s licensing agreement has allowed television producers, filmmakers, podcasters and local-to-global content creators to access and acquire rights to millions of hours of archival and breaking-news content from CBS News, the two companies said.

Under the new deal, CBS News and Stations will continue to utilize Veritone’s aiWARE enterprise AI platform, which offers access to its extensive licensed content across numerous distribution channels, the companies reported.

The advanced AI capabilities of aiWARE index the CBS library with time-correlated metadata to enable advanced and precise search and retrieval, helping researchers and creatives to quickly find specific scenes, quotes or highlights. It also automates rights management and delivery.

“We are thrilled to extend our longstanding CBS News partnership,” Jay Bailey, senior vice president of licensing at Veritone, said. “With Veritone’s Content Licensing platform, CBS News and Stations gain continued access to advanced AI solutions to enhance the accessibility of their content and provide exceptional experiences for viewers across digital landscapes. This renewal is a testament to the value we deliver, and we’re excited to drive further innovation and growth in how users can search and identify their content.”

More information is available at licensing.veritone.com.

DENVER––In a bid to improve the content management and revenue potential of its archives, Court TV has selected Veritone to manage and monetize its extensive digital content library.

Court TV, which offers live coverage of trials, boasts a massive content archive dates to the founding of the original Court TV cable network in 1991. To better manage, organize and monetize that library, E.W. Scripps-owned multicast network Court TV is deploying Veritone’s AI-powered Digital Media Hub. DMH provides a secure, cloud-based environment for content storage, search and retrieval that makes Court TV’s content accessible to its affiliates, media professionals, partners and legal institutions.

In addition to content management, Veritone’s Content Licensing will enable Court TV to exploit new revenue opportunities by offering its unique content to an even broader audience, including more filmmakers, documentarians and podcasters, enhancing its reach and impact, the companies said.

“Consumer interest in the real-life drama of true-crime programming is at an all-time high and the Court TV library is enormous, containing thousands of hours of coverage and footage from the nation’s biggest cases over the past 30 years,” Ethan Nelson, head of Court TV, said. “We believe Veritone’s Digital Media Hub and content licensing solutions will help us pursue and unlock new opportunities for monetization of the library and make the content even more accessible to audiences and partners alike.”

Court TV’s adoption of Veritone’s solutions reflects the growing trend among media organizations to adopt AI-powered tools to become more efficient and better monetize content.

More information about Veritone’s Digital Media Hub is available here; more information about Veritone’s Content Licensing can be found here.

LONDON—Getty Images and BBC Studios, the commercial subsidiary of the BBC, has announced the launch of a new platform giving its customers unprecedented access to BBC archive video along with new search, purchase and download capabilities.  

Designed to intuitively enable end-users to select and order content, the platform is powered by MAM software specialists VIDA Content OS.

The platform allows easy access to over 57,000 programs from the BBC archive which was previously only available offline by a heavily manual process. Customers can now securely search the entire digitized library, view, annotate, clip, share, and download previews for use within projects. Post clearance, the high-resolution masters are available immediately, providing significant benefits for fast turnaround projects.

It also offers curated collections around upcoming events and commissioning trends as well as the latest Speech to Text tools to enable program makers to ‘transcript search’ all assets, bringing to light previously hidden content from BBC Motion Gallery’s vast archive. 

“The VIDA platform is a significant breakthrough in making BBC content more accessible for our customers around the world,” said Paul Davis, vice president of media and production EMEA at Getty Images said, Our team is increasingly working as a creative partner, able to assist from ideas stage through production and this platform will considerably enable our efforts in supporting producers to derive successful, returnable shows for the global market.” 

“Our partnership with Getty Images is focused on getting BBC content into the hands of program makers around the world,” added Chris Hulse, head of BBC Motion Gallery at BBC Studios added. “This new platform is a game changer for us, surfacing a wealth of previously offline BBC content, now accessible on-demand for the first time ever.” 

“We’re delighted to power the integration of BBC Motion Gallery and Getty Images,” noted Symon Roue, managing director at VIDA. “As the archive footage licensing industry grows year over year, customers expect an integrated and efficient supply chain for servicing of catalogue. Accessibility to the clips that matter, using the latest cloud and AI technology, is where Content OS excels.”

The new platform expands the on-demand offering of BBC content for Getty Images customers who can already access over 200,000 BBC editorial and creative clips on gettyimages.com. 

Getty Images offers an expansive video library of over 25 million video clips, including footage from a range of world-renowned broadcast, studio, film-maker and archive partners. Available to customers are contemporary, archive and creative footage, including more than 12 million clips in 4K and vast offline archives from BBC Motion Gallery and NBC News. 

WRAL-TV will be offering a public preview of its new ArchiveAI-powered media platform, WRAL Archives, to industry users attending the last day of NAB Show New York, Oct. 26. Anyone interested in trying the new platform can create a free account at wralarchives.com. 

“WRAL Archives is a revolutionary new platform that will change the way people access and use archival footage,” said Jimmy Goodmon, COO of Capitol Broadcasting Company. “With WRAL Archives, content creators can easily find the exact clip they need from our library, regardless of how old or obscure it may be.” 

WRAL Archives uses state-of-the-art artificial intelligence to automatically extract metadata from media assets, including facial sentiment, audio transcription, logo identification, subject demographics, object identification, weather conditions, and much more. The company is currently using its ArchiveAI™ platform to process its entire content library from WRAL-TV’s 67 years of broadcasting. 

“The detailed AI-powered search capabilities of this platform is incredible. You can search for a specific person saying a specific phrase during a year range and then filter the footage by sentiment and an AI-powered search score,” said Jon Accarrino, VP of Transformation at Capitol Broadcasting Company. “And it only takes a few seconds. I’ve never seen anything like it before.” 

The team at WRAL-TV, the powerhouse Raleigh TV station anchoring the broadcast arm of Capitol Broadcasting Company (CBC), partnered with Eon Media to leverage their AI technology to power the WRAL Archives. Eon Media was recognized with a win for best “AI/Machine Learning” at the NAB Show’s Product of the Year Awards in 2022 for their Eon Extract product. 

“Working with WRAL and Capitol Broadcasting has been an immense learning and positive opportunity to challenge the status-quo and enable unique monetization opportunities,” said Ashish Agrawal, Founder & CEO of Eon Media. “WRAL Archives is a testament to the power of AI to transform the way we interact with and consume video content.” 

Internally, the WRAL team has already made some important discoveries in their archives because of the new AI-generated metadata.  

“We keep finding clips from the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s that we thought were lost,” added Pete Sockett, Director of Engineering and Operations at WRAL-TV.  “Video tape was expensive back then and people would often try to put as many clips as they could on one tape. So, a tape with an air-check from the 1980s might have some bonus clips at the end that we didn’t know that we still had.” 

WRAL-TV began broadcasting in 1956 and has an extensive collection of over 500,000 hours of archive footage. In addition to its older archive media, the company produces over 11 hours of new content per day. To approach this challenge, the team is ‘burning the candle at both ends’ and having AI process both the newest and oldest footage in their archive at the same time.  

The project team started testing with a collection of digitized tapes.  Consisting of a mix of news packages and air-checks from the 1970s and 1980s, these longer clips with lower resolutions were a good test of the AI’s capabilities. Lower resolutions can be challenging for both humans and AI to identify things like faces, objects, and logos. Another major test for the AI was segmentation. Because the longer air-check tapes can contain multiple newscasts, the AI needs to use contextual clues to automatically split clips into smaller segments. 

While the AI was processing WRAL’s older archives, the project team then began building automations for their newest content. After each WRAL newscast, assets now automatically move into a server that sends them to the ArchiveAI™ for metadata processing and inclusion on wralarchives.com. 

“WRAL Archives is a game-changer for the TV news industry,” said John Conway, Director of Special Projects at Capitol Broadcasting Company. “It gives broadcasters and other media organizations a way to make their archival content more accessible and valuable than ever before.” 

Teams at both WRAL and Eon Media have been working on the WRAL Archives project for over a year. In addition to the 11 hours of new daily content being produced by WRAL, an additional 1,000+ files are processed by artificial intelligence every day. WRAL is months away from having AI process 100% of its archive, but the platform is at a point where it’s ready for a test drive. 

“We are still finalizing everything. A lot of footage still needs to be processed. But we are at the stage where we want user feedback from the NAB community,” Accarrino added. “This AI-powered platform is a tool that other media organizations will be able to take advantage of, and gathering valuable feedback from our industry peers will help make it even better.”  

Capitol Broadcasting Company plans to officially launch WRAL Archives in Spring 2024. But both industry professionals and NAB attendees are invited to join the WRAL Archives public preview now and use the feedback tools to submit comments. 

SUNNYVALE, Calif.—In a notable example of how broadcasters are adopting generative AI to provide new content and experiences to viewers, Fox Sports has announced that it is working with Google to unlock the full potential of Fox’s vast sports content archives using Google Cloud's generative AI (gen AI) technology. 

The announcement expands on Fox Sports and Google Cloud's work in building Fox Sports' Intelligent Asset Service (IAS) that was first announced in 2020.

As part of the expanded collaboration with Google, Fox Sports is now planning to use use Google Cloud's gen AI technology through Vertex AI Vision to quickly search footage from more than 1.9 million videos and then produce new content in near real-time to delight and engage its global audiences. 

The collaboration has particularly important implications for the production of live events. Vertex AI Vision will allow Fox Sports to more quickly ingest live video and images, analyze millions of hours of games footage and commentary, while helping Fox employees create new television content, social media clippings, marketing assets, and more with ease. 

"With Google Cloud, we're able to utilize video search, advanced machine learning, and artificial intelligence to automate one of the most manual processes in sports media: tagging and searching video content," said Brad Zager, president of production/operations & executive producer, Fox Sports. "Compared to previous media management workflows, our team is able to swiftly find relevant content, which is critical in the business of live sports." 

Fox Sports' Intelligent Asset Service (IAS), which was first announced in 2020, utilizes Google Cloud's video search and advanced machine learning capabilities to help the sports network automate managing media assets. IAS allows Fox Sports to gain more value from its content library by reducing its reliance on paper logs, conflicting systems, and producers manually sifting through tapes by hand. As of 2022, IAS has been implemented across all major Fox Sports broadcasts, the companies reported. 

An early adopter of Google Workspace, Fox Sports is able to better connect and collaborate with teammates across Docs, Sheets, Slides, Drive, and more—no matter the device, the companies explained. With Duet AI in Google Workspace, the Fox can also create a production schedule for a sports season in minutes versus the hours it would take to do so manually. 

"Fox Sports is committed to providing its viewers the best possible experiences across platforms, and that starts with the technology that powers them," said Thomas Kurian, CEO, Google Cloud. "By choosing Google Cloud's AI technologies, Fox Sports is not only maximizing its content production capabilities, but also delivering transformative viewing experiences that keep its audiences engaged and entertained."

WALNUT CREEK, Calif.—XenData has unveiled the E-Series Object Storage Archive Appliance, an on-premise archive platform offering support for between 280 TB and 1.12 PB of storage that can be accessed via a Windows file system and as object storage with an S3 interface.

A media-focused platform, the E-Series supports partial file restoration, a technique that restores parts of large files to create clips without having to restore a complete file. E-Series also supports playing video directly from the appliance, the company said.

It is compatible with many Media Asset Management systems, including those from Aveco, Cinegy, Dalet, EditShare, eMAM, Facilis, IPV, Metus, Videomenthe and VSN. Used with a MAM, E-Series provides for centralized storage that promotes collaboration and enhances productivity, it said.

The base E-Series configuration has a single storage node, which delivers a usable capacity of 280 TB. As extra capacity is needed, the system can be expanded by adding up to three additional 280 TB nodes. The appliance provides fast archive and restore operations, optimized for large files. It is available with several network options, including dual 10/25 GbE ports, XenData said. 

The E-Series runs a Windows Server 2022 operating system. When accessed as a file system over a local network, it adheres to Microsoft security based on Active Directory. When using the S3 object storage interface, content stored on the appliance can be accessed from anywhere using secure HTTPS, it said.

The appliance supports three data protection options, each of which creates a second instance of the files/objects on a second-tier storage location. Support is included for the following options:

• Mirror to LTO data tape in an attached robotic library.
• Mirror to public cloud object storage, including to AWS, Azure, Seagate Lyve and Wasabi.
• Mirror to another E-Series appliance located in another physical location.

When one of the data protection options is implemented, the system supports deep archive of content. This is achieved by configuring the appliance with disk retention policies to convert files/objects to stubs. A stub takes minimal space on the appliance disk storage, and files/objects in deep archive are restored from the second-tier storage by simply reading the stub file.

An E-Series base configuration with one 280 TB node costs $64,800. The archive storage platform is available now.

More information is available on the company’s website.

PARIS—Iron Mountain Entertainment Services (IMES) has announced the opening of their new facility in Paris, the company’s first preservation facility in France. 

With facilities in the U.S, Canada, the U.K. and Ireland, this marks their 17th global facility, which will provide climate-controlled media storage (including fridge storage and private vaults) and asset preservation services to international media clients.

The new Pantin facility includes climate controlled storage rooms and private vaults. In addition to physical asset storage, the facility also offers digital solutions ranging from asset digitization and transfer, metadata creation and enrichment, and digital preservation and distribution through their Smart Vault platform.

“We are thrilled to be opening our newest media storage facility in Paris at a time when our entertainment clients are actively mining their content archives for monetisation opportunities,” says Hanna Balouka, head of client partnerships, France. “This storage facility is built to world-class sustainability standards and will  provide the French market with a much-needed option for premium, secure, climate-controlled media storage. The building features state-of-the-art energy efficiency measures, consistent with Iron Mountain's commitment to meet ambitious net-zero targets. IMES also offers volume and specialized digitisation and digital storage, so now clients' materials don't ever have to leave the safety of the IMES environment."

Trusted by more than 3,500 organizations around the world, a few notable French clients include French broadcast powerhouse Canal+.

The new facility is located at Pantin Logistique at 110, bis Avenue du Général Leclerc - 93500 Pantin Entrepôt N°15, étage 2B. More information about Iron Mountain Entertainment Services (IMES) is available here.  

BOSTON—The Mellon Foundation has awarded GBH $16 million to support the American Archive of Public Broadcasting (AAPB), a collaboration between GBH and the Library of Congress, that works to digitize, preserve and make accessible historically significant public radio and television programs from producers and stations across the United States. 

This grant will be the largest private philanthropic grant GBH has ever received.

“We are grateful to the Mellon Foundation for their support of the American Archive of Public Broadcasting. This vast collection of public media programs is American history as seen through local, regional and national lenses, but we are in a race against time to preserve these at-risk treasures now on fragile and obsolete formats,” said GBH president and CEO Susan Goldberg. “The AAPB ensures that critical works of culture, news, arts and more are identified and made accessible to the public for years to come.” 

The AAPB contains nearly 100,000 items online available for the public to stream for free, dating back more than 70 years, with thousands more available for research access. 

Collections and content range from full episodes of groundbreaking public affairs programs like WNET’s Black Journal, unedited interviews recorded for series like Eyes on the Prize, the kid-driven ‘70s series ZOOM, and the entire “gavel-to-gavel” coverage of the Watergate Hearings. Exhibits delve into public media’s coverage of protests in America, Latino empowerment, Indigenous representation and much more. 

The AAPB was initiated by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting with a series of pilot projects before granting stewardship to the Library of Congress and GBH in 2013.

The grant builds on previous support from the Mellon Foundation and will enable the AAPB to expand its work by: 

• Identifying collections suitable for preservation; 
• Prioritizing digitization and ingestion of collections representing the diversity of American voices currently stored on at-risk, deteriorating media formats; 
• Supporting the digitization of up to 150,000 items, thereby doubling the current size of the collection; 
• Participating in the development of open-source digital tools to improve content management;
• Enhancing the public website and supporting the needs of its growing and evolving user base;
• Expanding development of special collections and exhibits, outreach to communities of interest, and cultivation of an ethic of preservation throughout the public media community. 

“This grant from the Mellon Foundation is a recognition of the AAPB’s vital work in preserving decades of American history, told through the diverse voices and perspectives of stations across the country and U.S. territories,” said Karen Cariani, the David O. Ives executive director of the GBH Media Library and Archives and GBH project director for the AAPB. “With this funding, the AAPB will be able to better support its contributing stations as well as the growing number of users who rely on our digital archive for education, journalism, scholarship and more.” 

"The preservation of public media is as critical as its creation. Mellon’s commitment to help ensure the longevity of this multivocal cultural and civic heritage will provide future generations opportunities to understand themselves and their communities in more complete ways," said Patricia Hswe, program officer for public knowledge at The Mellon Foundation. "I'm thrilled that GBH, in collaboration with the Library of Congress, will be able to pursue this rescue work on a large scale and make substantial progress in saving this endangered media."

WALNUT CREEK, Calif.—Data storage provider XenData has announced the CX-10 Plus, a cloud archive appliance with local backup to LTO data tape. 

The appliance connects to a local network and provides a fast gateway to unlimited cloud object storage, the company explained. Content written to the cloud is mirrored to LTO data cartridges creating a local backup copy for greatly enhanced data protection. This saves money as it is an alternative to paying for geo-replication from the cloud provider. And if there is a need to move to a different cloud provider, files can be restored from the LTO backup, avoiding expensive egress fees.

“The CX-10 Plus has two key benefits,” explained Dr. Phil Storey, XenData CEO. “Creating a local synchronized copy of every file written to the cloud gives peace of mind. And the Appliance easily pays for itself by minimizing cloud storage fees.”

The appliance is optimized for media archives allowing users to play video files directly from the cloud. Furthermore, it has proven integration with many complementary media applications including media asset management systems. It provides a fast connection to cloud object storage by using multi-threaded archive and restore operations, even when transferring a single large video file, the company said. 

The CX-10 Plus supports multiple clouds including Amazon Web Services S3, Azure blob storage, Wasabi S3 and Seagate Lyve object storage. It supports multiple cloud storage tiers including AWS Glacier Flexible Retrieval and Deep Glacier and Azure Hot, Cool and Archive tiers.

Content written to the cloud is mirrored to LTO data cartridges creating a local backup copy. The Appliance manages up to two external LTO drives or an LTO autoloader and it includes a 14 TB disk cache which is used to implement the LTO backup, as follows: 

• All archived files are first written to the CX-10 Plus internal 14 TB disk cache from where they are immediately uploaded to the designated cloud storage.
• The archived files are retained on the cache for a defined retention period, typically a day.
• Every few hours the files are synchronized to LTO creating a mirror copy of the file-folder structure that has been archived to the cloud.

The CX-10 Plus will be available in September 2022.  Prices start at $11,950, excluding the managed LTO drive or autoloader.

At this year’s Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA) Annual Conference in Baltimore, four awards will be presented by the organization to individuals and organizations who have demonstrated exceptional work in the areas of preservation. The ceremony will take place on November 14 at the Parkway Theatre in Baltimore, where the convention runs from November 13 -16.

The 2019 recipients are:

• The Silver Light Award to Eddie Richmond, UCLA Film and Television Archive
• The Ray Edmondson Advocacy Award to South Side Home Movie Project, represented by Jacqueline Stewart, Sabrina Craig, and Candace Ming
• The Alan Stark Award to Adrian Wood, OWL Studio Ltd
• The William S. O’Farrell Volunteer Award to Snowden Becker, audiovisual archivist and educator

AMIA’s Silver Light Award recognizes career achievement in the field of moving image archives, including professional and volunteer works or activities, and contributions to preservation and restoration projects. For nearly four decades, Eddie Richmond was one of the principle executives of the UCLA Film and Television Archive. Eddie’s tenure has seen the archive grow from a few hundred titles to over 200,000 – the second largest public archive in the United States – and was integral to its move from rented space in Hollywood to the PHI Stoa, a state-of-the-art center in Santa Clarita built by The Packard Humanities Institute. A strong believer in collaboration, the range of Eddie’s many activities extend to the most important institutions across the globe.

In 2018, AMIA presented its first Advocacy Award to Ray Edmondson in recognition of his history of advocacy for cinema, archives and archivists around the world. This year, the newly named Ray Edmondson Advocacy Award will honor the South Side Home Movie Project. The project is an archival and research initiative to collect, preserve and exhibit amateur films from Chicago’s South Side neighborhood. The South Side Home Movie Project grew from the notable absence home movies (especially from minorities) in the canon of film scholarship which is only now beginning to change. The project also seeks to provide context and history for this historic neighborhood.

The Alan Stark Award honors individuals who have made a significant contribution through their efforts on a special project or in project management that contributes to, and supports, the work of moving image archives and/or the operations of AMIA. When Adrian Wood began working with the International Olympics Committee in 1996, it was at a time when the Olympic film collection was virtually lost. Over a 12 year period he worked, supported by eight local researchers, with thirty-one archives, broadcasters, production studios and libraries, eleven laboratories, seven specialist restoration facilities for sound and image on five continents. These collaborations led to the recovery and restoration of more than 40 long-form documentaries and 60 additional short films. Together the Olympic films form a body of work that provides a unique audiovisual legacy not only of sport but of style, fashion, sports technology and production methodologies captured on a four year cycle, (except when interrupted by war), and so thereby creating a unique collection.

The William S. O’Farrell Volunteer Award is named for long-time member Bill O’Farrell honoring his volunteer efforts and mentoring role he played over the years to so many archivists. This year’s recipient, Snowden Becker, is the glue between dozens of archival communities that all overlap because of her commitment and involvement in the field. She is an advocate and mentor for those who aim to contribute to media archival scholarship and praxis, and a vigilant promoter of good work being done in the archival community. Snowden has served on the Board of Directors, a Committee Chair, and at has been instrumental in developing new that welcome newcomers to the association and the annual conference. Beyond her duties running the UCLA Moving Image Archive Studies and Masters of Library and Information Science programs, Snowden has always gone above and beyond to mentor and prepare students to work in the archival field after graduation, and continues to meet with alumni long after they graduate to help them navigate working in the media archiving industry. With what little free time Snowden had left after her full-time job and work for AMIA, she founded the Center for Home Movies and created the structure for Home Movie Day, which now has grown into an international event

More than 650 professionals representing the world’s major media institutions gather each year for AMIA’s Annual Conference. Attendees represent all areas of the community-corporate and national archives, media companies, libraries, historical societies, service providers, universities, and more. Workshops, screenings, and more than 60 sessions programmed by working archivists address the best ways to preserve and provide access to our media.

For more information on the full program, or to register for the AMIA Annual Conference, visit www.amiaconference.net. 

In the broadcast industry, archive footage fills an important role by allowing broadcasters and media production companies to build previous content into new programs and create more compelling stories to connect with their audiences. We see this regularly with sports coverage, for example, where broadcasters use clips from previous events or games to help build excitement, provide context and create a narrative that the audience can buy into. Over several years, broadcasters can build up an extensive library of assets and video, which if not managed properly, can cause a major headache. Often, this stems from the fact that they experience significant challenges when trying to access archive footage, which is saved in different places across disparate systems, making it difficult to find specific clips.

A FRAGMENTED UNIVERSE

For broadcasters, it’s common to have a number of facilities across multiple locations, particularly within live broadcast, which can see a number of OB vans in use across several locations. While this may be conducive to creating new content, the use of ineffective databases can make it difficult to share content with individuals across these many locations. As a result, it may not be possible to find specific pieces of footage when needed. This can cause further problems, either due to the fact that the content will have to be recreated at an extra expense or because the video is impossible to recreate, which will be the case if it’s from a live sporting event, for example. Problems are also encountered when content is stored in different places by different users. Therefore, if an employee leaves the organization, they may take the knowledge of where assets are located with them.

Yet, this is just one part of the issue, and it is only going to get worse as broadcasters’ content libraries continue to grow. A major challenge of having such a large back catalogue is trying to find material once it has been stored—after all, how do you organize thousands of hours of footage and how can you then locate the exact clip you need? For instance, tracking down a clip from the 1996 Olympic Games can become a huge undertaking. Consequently, it is vital that broadcasters find a solution that allows them to easily store, label and share content, overcoming these complications and reducing time and effort spent locating collateral.

LOOKING TO THE CLOUD

In order to resolve the current dilemma broadcasters are facing, they must look to implement a more robust cloud-based solution that will ensure their digital assets are not only protected but also reusable for the future. This will be a low-risk, high-reward operation, which will enable them to safely store their content, but also share it internally across any number of their locations. By alleviating themselves of ineffective databases and the practice of storing items across disparate locations, these organizations stand to see significant benefits, many of which will be realized immediately, such as the ability to easily search for and find any video.

By using a single content management platform, broadcasters also open themselves up to the opportunity to monetize their video. As proven by almost all major broadcasters, a wealth of historic program stored online creates the potential for VOD services. This is something that we have seen with HBO and the creation of its on-demand service HBO Now for its treasure trove of TV shows. This development was the result of the digitization of existing content spanning many years. While the majority of broadcasters won’t have as wide-ranging a library, moving to a single, digitized catalogue of content creates the opportunity to develop new revenue streams.

Implementing a digital solution may also give broadcasters the push to digitize any content that currently only exists in hard copies on film or video. This is something most of us can relate to in our personal lives, with old photo albums or video tapes from our childhoods stored thoughtlessly in shoeboxes or at the back of a wardrobe. But, when we think about the value, even if just sentimental, of these items, most of us would be willing to pay for a cloud solution to allow us to store digitized versions in one place and gain assurance about its long-term security. This is something that is mirrored by broadcasters but on a much larger scale and with a much higher price tag attached to the content. For broadcasters, physical assets are far more likely to get lost, damaged or destroyed, and if they exist only in this format, they are irreplaceable. As such, moving to a cloud-based solution presents broadcasters with the capacity to digitize any archive footage that currently exists solely on film or video, ensuring that it is secure and allowing them to scale as their collection expands.

As the amount of older material broadcasters and media companies must store increases, the size and scale of the headache they are dealing with will grow in tandem. Organizations that fail to address the challenge of storing existing content will only see the problem worsen and will feel the effects on the quality of their output. However, broadcasters that act now and implement a new solution will benefit from a system that makes it easier for their entire organization to access and share content in order to create more compelling viewing experiences, as well as the potential to open up new revenue streams.

Tim Jobling is the CTO for Imagen. 

 Maybe this has happened to you: You’re on deadline for a live, episodic show, and need a few seconds of archival footage. Except that it’s somewhere else. And even though you put in the request a few hours ago, there’s a wreck on the road between it, and you. Plus, it’s on tape, which can make ingest unpredictably dicey -- which always seems to hijack your day right when you’re on a super-tight deadline.

The tape finally arrives, but searching for the sliver of footage you need is painfully linear: First, the dang thing gets jammed in the machine, during which you learn that there’s not even a spreadsheet or simple manifest database to guide you.

And then you find out that the guy who knows all the double-dog secret workarounds of the nine or so vendor-proprietary subsystems, necessary to get your segment going, is out and unreachable. (And it’s only 10 in the morning.)

So You Have Archive Issues?

The common denominator in all of these day-to-day broadcast realities can be summed up in two words: Archive issues. Archive issues that hobble the ability to emulate the agility of Internet-sourced video. Archive issues that exacerbate storage capacity, aggravate operating costs, and lag viewer expectations.

Archive issues are an active undercurrent right now, in broadcast industry conversations -- in hallways, over dinner, and in cross-departmental meetings between “ops-side people” and “IT-side people,” often within the same organization. It’s a daunting and communal challenge, all centered on the need for “active archives,” or at least some way to scale-out those archives, once and for all. On their cloud, or a public cloud, or some combination of the two.

Cisco UCS S-Series servers deliver a scalable, modular active data storage solution that's ideal for media. They offer storage that’s less expensive than a NAS, but 100x faster than digital tape alternatives used for archiving. Check out the UCS S-Series on the Cisco website. 

Here’s the short list of “how best to” considerations, culled from my notes with multiple conversations with broadcast-side engineering and IT colleagues over the past few months. “It’s the same for all of us,” one explained. “It’s all these questions about ‘how best to’ do this or that. In no particular order:

• How best to “scale out storage,” as an over-riding driver.
• How best to solve -- or at least stay reasonably ahead of -- video resolution advances, like the progression from HD to 4K to 8K (with 16K in the wings), each progressively “heavier” to carry.
• How best to solve for the growing landscape of display screens, beyond the TV.
• How best to harness the celebrated “ease of use” inherent to “the Internet” -- on the back end, and the viewer-facing front.
• How best to make something truly “evergreen” -- for real, and forever. This is closely related to the matter of how to forever avoid the need for yet another “data migration,” from one tape or digital method to the next.

All of this is happening within the larger, organizational conundrum of how to slipstream into that new cultural norm that is agility, DevOps, and “mobile speed” -- itself a gear or two faster than “Internet speed,” which is several gears faster than traditional, broadcast speed.

Here’s my short list of the “perfect world” for archive management, from the engineers, technologists, and data/IP-side people who work in media and entertainment. The specific ask was, “what characterizes your perfect world, when it comes to your audio/video archives?

Active media archive solutions offer broadcasters options that are significantly less expensive and more flexible than traditional methods.

The Perfect World

Desire #1: Remove the shackles of archival storage capacity! On tape and in file-based environments, said one senior broadcast engineer, adding, “every time you add another tape to the library, you’re adding another mouth to feed.” A few years later, that tape will likely need to be handled again, she noted -- or worse, become obsolete.

The disk equivalent of this also exists, by way of “NAS proliferation”: You fill up one system, then another, and another, until you feel like you can’t manage anything, because you’re so busy managing everything. The point: Tape is inexpensive, and limitless! File-based storage is not as inexpensive, but it’s also limitless! In both cases, the more there is, the larger the management headache. Short-term fixes often cause long-term nightmares.

Desire #2: Make it as easy to search an in-house archive for a dated segment, as it is to search on Google for the nearest fish taco. Shifting away from tape, to a private (meaning in-house) or public (meaning AWS, Azure, Google, pick your favorite) cloud simultaneously brings web-like advancements in segment searches. Systems already exist that offer “self-describing media,” for describing clips, dates, anything that exists on the “box art.” Make it as easy as a web search, another broadcast network engineer said, “as opposed to today’s methods, which are about one Dewey away from having to go to the library to flick through a card catalog.” Simplifying search can save money, too, noted one media archive manager, who confessed to sometimes buying the same stock media more than once, “because it’s easier than finding the original.”

Desire #3: Give it some AI, for heaven’s sake.Artificial Intelligence systems thrive on the mountains of data that look daunting, otherwise, and the archives of the world’s broadcasters are … mountainous. (Metaphorically, anyway.) Consider a hypothetical but plausible broadcaster with a show that’s entertained millions of people, every week, for 40 years. Let’s say that’s about 800 episodes, archived on thousands of tapes (analog and digital), and on network-attached drives. All in, the archive is measured in Petabytes. That’s a lotta headache.

The good new is, work is also progressing, very rapidly, to apply AI to automated metadata creation. Its role: To gather and sort known (embedded/preexisting) and unknown data, on a frame-by-frame basis: That’s a dog. That’s Tiny Fey. That’s a red Jeep. Such are the hooks available with active archives and AI.

Desire #4:Make it slipstream right into my existing workflows. All of them. Over and over again, a common refrain when daydreaming about the perfect archival situation involves the day-to-day, very busy, very hectic workloads shouldered by today’s broadcast and IT professionals. Nobody needs or wants “big, monolithic system #9,” which requires a squadron of integrators to get it tied into existing back-office subsystems. An ideal active archive system spans objects and files; media asset managers and editing stations. All of it, wherever it is, with a front-end that speaks the same language as today’s clouds.

Desire #5: Make it break the “chains of dependency.” Particularly with technologists working with object-based storage, a strong desire persists for standardized ways of handling archives, “with HTTP-based everything.” Make it work with the storage protocols common to the Internet, like the S3 API, among others -- which were created for the Internet. Not adapted, shimmed, or otherwise derived from existing systems. Nothing proprietary, with objects that are portable and can live in any storage environment. (There was considerable “harrumphing” on this one.)

These are the challenges facing lots and lots of engineers, technologists, and IT-side professionals in the media and entertainment sector. They’re at the “how best to” phase now, and sizing up available ways to shore up their mountains of archives, once and for all. Their wish lists are understandable, and doable. (So I keep hearing, anyway.)

Watch for “active archives” to be a common thread over the next couple of months, as broadcast-side professionals start gearing up for the 2018 National Association of Broadcasters. And, if this kind of conversation is happening where you work, know that you can get a much more detailed assessment with two companies who will be there: Cisco, and its partner Cloudian. This is as close as I’ll ever get to an endorsement, by the way, but from the Department of Full Disclosure, they commissioned this series, and provided the background and some of the engineers who informed this piece.

In closing: May your archives be active and scalable!

This is the second in a six-part blog series preceding the 2018 NAB Show. Click here to read more about what broadcasters will be talking about at this year's show. Click the thumbnail below for the next installment in this series.

About the Author: Leslie Ellis is a respected “technology translator,” well known in cable and telecom circles for her award-winning, 20+ year “Translation Please” column in Multichannel News. She took on this Cisco-sponsored pre-NAB series to point out common and frustrating obstacles, for anyone on the sliding transition toward “being more Internet-like.” It is less of a comprehensive representation of available options, and more a glimpse into what’s worrisome, on a day-to-day basis, for engineers and IT people who work in media and entertainment.