It will digitise 111,000 hours of content from 95,000 tapes
Archiving specialist Iron Mountain Entertainment Services (IMES) has won the contract to digitise up to 111,000 hours of tape archive for French content producer and broadcaster Canal+ Group.
The Canal+ tape archive of approximately 500,000 tapes has been in the care of IMES since 2002.
The new three-year agreement between IMES and Canal+ will see IMES digitise approximately 95,000 tapes. The physical assets will remain managed, transferred and kept at IMES in France, while the digitised content will be uploaded directly to Canal+’s MAM platform, where it will be reviewed and approved.
The MAM is built on IMES’s Smart Vault platform, which provides archiving and long-term preservation of media files. The Smart Vault interfaces with Canal+’s production systems, enabling remote review of the digital collection and related metadata.
The contract includes an emergency provision for up to 10 specific tapes per day to be uploaded if Canal+ needs a particular piece of content urgently. IMES will also offer editing services for projects spread over several tapes – so, footage of a football match spread across three tapes, for example, will be edited together to form a single file.
Lance Podell, SVP and general manager for Iron Mountain Entertainment Services, said: “We are thrilled to have been awarded this opportunity to evolve our existing 20-year relationship caring for Canal+’s physical media archive into a partnership that involves both digitisation of those assets and long-term digital preservation. Canal+ has specific technical and logistical requirements for this project that are a perfect match for our unique, deep knowledge of Canal+’s archive, our extensive digitisation credentials, our team’s deep technical expertise, our work with many other global brands within the Vivendi family, and our willingness to create a bespoke service for Canal+ tailored to their specific technical and logistical needs.”
Albert Sellem, director of operations at Canal+, added: “Broadcasters are faced with a huge demand for streaming content, so it makes sense to repurpose our valuable existing assets to answer that demand. IMES’ expert team knows our content, understands our stringent quality requirements and is able to accommodate time-sensitive requests to deliver the content we need with precision and efficiency.”
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