Front Porch Digital has announced that Major League Baseball (MLB) Productions will be using its SAMMA robotic technology for archiving videotaped content onto digital storage media.
“Because videotape is an inherently fragile storage medium, we've prioritized the migration of our archived content to digital format. In fact, the project is fundamental to MLB Productions' mission of safeguarding, preserving, and making available the unique audio-visual record of the game,” said Elizabeth Scott, vice president of programming and business affairs for MLB Productions. “We rigorously researched the available technology and what appeals to us most about the SAMMA solution is, first, its capability of automating a significant portion of the process, thereby reducing the need for constant tape-by-tape manipulation.”
MLB has selected a SAMMA technology for use in connection with the multi-year archiving project. The robotic system will be used in conjunction with a Front Porch Digital DIVArchive system which has already been installed at the MLB Productions facility in Secaucus, N.J. The SAMMA systems will be performing both tape digitization operations and JPEG 2000 and XDCAM HD50 encoding tasks.
The network has more than 150,000 hours of baseball footage now preserved on videotape, and its library is growing by more than 2,400 recordings each year. While the bulk of this material is recorded in the Betacam cassette format, the migration process will also involve other formats, including U-Matic tape and film. The oldest MLB sports footage dates back to 1905.
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