Nominated by: SBS – Maddy Kortegast
Nominee: SBS – Maddy Kortegast and Adam Hodginkinson
Title: SBS’s Videotape Archive Preservation Project
Special Broadcast Services (SBS) is an Australian Public Broadcaster with the principal function of provide providing multilingual and multicultural radio, television and digital media services that inform, educate and entertain all Australians and, in doing so, reflect Australia’s multicultural society.
SBS has undertaken the third stage of its videotape broadcast archive digitisation and preservation project. The project commenced in January 2017 and is due for completion in September 2018. SBS chose to outsource the digitisation of the collection and partnered with DAMsmart to complete the project. DAMsmart is an Australian based audio-visual digitisation agency and specialises in large-scale audio-visual migration projects.
At the completion of this stage of the project, the digitisation and preservation program will result in content held on over 24,000 videotapes (including Betacam, DVCPro and MiniDV) being digitised. The project has delivered approximately .8PBs of preservation data as well as .6PBs of broadcast ready files content for use in the broadcast environment.
What the project will and has already achieved is safeguarding the cultural relevance & future importance of the unique SBS collection for the Australian public – the content will be forgotten, undiscoverable, if left on physical tape to deteriorate. SBS has tackled the challenges of content inaccessibility, foisted on us by technology obsolescence and removed the risk of valuable content loss due to failing and degrading physical media. Excellent media preservation process and collaboration has secured this content for future inspiration. This is a great Australian story to be sung.
