Sony, Memnon Archiving Services ink new digitisation partnership
Last week’s NAB Show saw Sony announce details of a partnership with Memnon Archiving Services, a leading digital preservation provider responsible for digitising, restoring and preserving more than 2,000,000 hours of audio-visual archives for numerous cultural institutions and broadcasters around the world. Sony’s Media Lifecycle Services and Memnon will jointly offer their technology and industrial workflow proficiency and experience to customers, based upon their combined expertise of delivering large-scale digital preservation projects involving audio, video and film content. Memnon’s customers include Danish Radio, the British Library, Bibliothèque Nationale de France and Indiana University, while Sony digitally converts and distributes over 150 million files for organisations such as BBC Worlwide and Sony Pictures Entertainment.
Michel Merten, CEO Memnon Archiving Services, says: “The partnership will combine our expertise in handling and digitally preserving large volumes of sensitive, precious content of all media types (incl. audio, video, and film) with Sony’s strong heritage and world-class knowledge around broadcast and audio-visual technologies. 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. Lower digital storage costs and the development of stable long-term digital storage formats, such as Sony’s Optical Disk Archive, have prompted many organisations to consider large-scale digitisation projects. Similarly, increased asset utilisation and new commercialisation opportunities have enhanced the business case for customers making this investment an immediate priority.
“Our research suggests that only 21% 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,” says 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.”
Sony launched Media Lifecycle Services in August 2014 to help content owners protect and maximise the value of their legacy content assets. Sony’s managed service offers a single point of contact, supporting customers to not only preserve and realise the commercial value of their content in the immediate term, but to also further develop value from their assets for the future.
“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,” concludes Baku Morikuni.