A+E Networks is comprised of well-known media brands, including A&E ®, The HISTORY ® Channel, Lifetime ® and BIOGRAPHY ® They are in eight out of 10 American homes, cumulatively reaching 335 million people worldwide. As the industry and art form have evolved, so has the network.
Since its founding in 1983 with just two cable channels, A+E Networks has grown into a multi-platform, multimedia, multi-genre content creator. One of the biggest challenges facing the media and entertainment industry now is the creation of new content.
With the COVID-19 pandemic, new productions were halted, and media companies were scrambling to fill the gaps – especially as people were stuck at home, turning to their TVs and devices for entertainment and distraction. Fortunately, A+E was able to rely on its back catalog to continue producing new content, especially at a time when historical content was in high demand as viewers craved comfort and a sense of nostalgia.
Leveraging historical footage
A+E Networks has always retained a treasure trove of historical video footage, but the pandemic created an urgency to digitize this archival content and make it accessible so that it could be used in new productions. Today’s media productions are completely digital – old movie reels have been replaced by digital cinematography – and content is captured, manipulated, and distributed digitally. With the help of Iron Mountain, A+E’s film stock can now be retrieved from the archives, encoded into a digital format, correctly cataloged and tagged with rich metadata, and stored on Amazon S3. The historical content can be easily searched, accessed, and used by the creative editorial teams to tell new stories. In addition to providing new storytelling content to the A+E Networks brands, the company has recently entered into an archival footage partnership with Shutterstock.
Any format, any challenge
Eleanor Eagle, Manager of Global Acquisitions Services at A+E Networks, worked closely with Iron Mountain to make the digitization partnership happen. She toured the Iron Mountain facility, learned about the storage, and visited the studio to determine if Iron Mountain would be a good fit for A+E’s needs.
“I realized Iron Mountain would be able to do all of this encoding work with all of these tapes which has been problematic for other vendors. The other vendors simply didn’t have the equipment that Iron Mountain did,” says Eagle. “That was a big breakthrough for us as a team to know that we could send a variety of different assets to Iron Mountain and still get that same end product because they had the equipment to do it.”
As A+E Networks found, Iron Mountain came through in terms of the necessary equipment, a long history of proven industry experience, and AWS expertise. Media and entertainment companies worldwide turn to Iron Mountain Media & Archival Services to preserve, access, and monetize their content. It is considered a one-stop shop for archiving and digitization needs, and can migrate, master, reformat, clean, enhance, and edit just about any legacy media format ever made into today’s digital media formats.
