The term archive brings to mind a stereotype or a schema of what you think it refers to. And that, often, is a dusty basement with stacks of boxes, keeping things safe or sometimes just out of sight; either because they’d be expensive to reproduce or just on the off chance that someone might need it again.
This preservation for preservation’s sake does a disservice to what’s possible with a proactive approach to archive.
For archivists like all of us at Memnon, a company that recently celebrated our 20th birthday, it means a lot more. It means access to, and the preservation of, incredible value. It gives us the ability to keep stories alive.
But even as archivists continue to bring those stories back to life, it hasn’t done much to shift that idea of the dusty basement. The reality is, we’re bringing things out from that basement. Blowing off the dust and creating new digital versions to not only protect it from getting lost to time but to breathe new life into it.
As we’ve reflected on Memnon’s 20 years in business, we’ve been talking a lot about how things have changed and ultimately why the idea of an archive is outdated.
So, what’s changed? Why is it no longer about simply keeping the original or a copy of the original in case it’s needed? History itself has been the change agent. Content has been archived for long enough and has been digitised or made more accessible to today’s machines to the point that it’s providing content owners with revenue streams that weren’t there ten years ago; D2C streaming subscription fees, FAST channel advertising revenues and reselling streaming rights.
And that’s just for existing programming. One of the most interesting trends we’ve seen recently is using archived media to tell a new story. Recent examples of this are countless; we’ve seen hours of documentaries produced where archival content holds up the narrative. Think sports documentaries like the award-winning The Last Dance, or Beckham on Netflix, or recent music docs like Peter Jackson’s The Beatles: Get Back.
This is even true for obituaries in current affairs programming. With fast access to archival media, we can tell stories about people’s lives. Think of the recent passing of Friends star Matthew Perry. It’s been commonplace since his death to see interviews and videos of Perry speaking about things like drug abuse and addiction, giving a platform to share his story rather than just showing a clip of him walking down a red carpet.
This ability to bring media back to life, regardless of how long it’s been archived, and create new programming – that of course can be monetised – really shows the power of modern archives.
So, if that’s how archive has changed; what does the future hold? What about the next 20 years?
It goes without saying that AI is already having an impact and will continue to do so. Editing with archival content, finding and deciding on the most fitting frames to effectively tell a story can be a challenging task, especially when sifting through footage, sometimes spanning hundreds of hours, to identify that perfect 30-second clip. This process is an art, and human expertise remains indispensable and should be celebrated as a genuine talent.
But what AI can do is act as an assistant in the post production process. It can significantly cut down 100 hours of footage to a relevant 10 or 15 hours by aiding search and find processes. In-picture image recognition and contextual analysis can both speed up finding the media you’re looking for and help unearth content that you didn’t even know was there.
One of the biggest barriers we come across when talking to customers about how they can make use of their archive is the idea that they don’t know what content they’ve got and the prospect of trying to untangle that seems overwhelming. AI can do a lot of the heavy lifting on that front both at the point of cataloguing footage and whenever you need to quickly access media.
Archive needs to shed the idea of the basement. It shouldn’t be an afterthought or something content owners feel they should do; that mindset needs to change. Content owners need to pivot to benefit from the opportunities that proper archives present. By adopting an archive-first approach, programming becomes an asset that can be used and monetised immediately, not just in 30 years time when someone produces a documentary.
Only by doing this can we change the preconception of archive simply as a cost centre and instead show it for what it truly is – not just an active revenue stream but something more than that, a living part of the content story that is as relevant today as when it was first recorded.
