Memnon Archiving Services and Sony are joining forces to extend their digital preservation capabilities, to help clients deliver large-scale digital preservations of audio-visual content, with Sony’s Media Lifecycle Service.
Preservation provider Memnon Archiving Services is responsible for digitising, restoring and preserving more than 2,000,000 hours of audio-visual archives for cultural institutions and broadcasters around the world, with customers including Danish Radio, the British Library and Bibliothèque Nationale de Sony digitally converts and distributes over 150 million files for organisations such as BBC Worlwide and Sony Pictures Entertainment.
“The partnership will combine our expertise in handling and digitally preserving large volumes of sensitive, precious content of all media types (including audio, video, and film) with Sony’s strong heritage and world-class knowledge around broadcast and audio-visual technologies,” said Michel Merten, CEO Memnon Archiving Services. “Together, our global project delivery capabilities will support customers as they embark on the pressing task of preserving their most valuable asset: their content.”
Organisations’ needs for large-scale digital preservation have accelerated due to the continuous physical deterioration of media carriers, alongside on-going interoperability and technology support changes. Sony launched Media Lifecycle Services in August 2014 to help content owners protect and maximise the value of their legacy content assets.
“Our research suggests that only 21 per cent of broadcasters have completed digitisation of their tape libraries, and that the average organisation which hasn’t digitised will store more than 100,000 legacy tapes on-site,” said Baku Morikuni, head of Sony’s Media Lifecycle Service. “As a result, many content owners have assets that are literally depreciating, yet simultaneously have increased opportunities for reusing and monetising their digital content, once it is made readily accessible.”
“The time to tackle this challenge is undoubtedly now, but any successful digital preservation project is reliant on proven technological and operational expertise. We believe that large-scale digitisation is a distinct discipline that requires industrial processes and methodologies for high efficiency and consistent quality. By partnering with Memnon we’re excited to bring that expertise to even more customers,” concluded Baku Morikuni.
