Iron Mountain Entertainment Services chosen by Canal+ to digitise its archives

Iron Mountain Entertainment Services (IMES) is the leading physical and digital media archiving service for the entertainment industry.

The company announced that it has developed a new innovative partnership with French content producer and broadcaster Canal+ Group to digitise up to 110,000 hours of its extensive tape archive, transformed into digital content for its streaming platforms.

The Canal+ tape archive, totalling approximately 500,000 tapes, has been in the care of IMES since 2002. IMES’ storage and logistics capabilities combined with its new Media Asset Management (MAM) platform Smart Vault from IMES will provide the group with a powerful one-stop digital content repository that ensures that originals are secure offline, while digital copies are easy to access and distribute.

“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, as well,” said Lance Podell, SVP and General Manager for Iron Mountain Entertainment Services. “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.”

The three-year agreement will see the digitisation of approximately 95,000 tapes delivered to Canal+’s specs standards while ensuring chain of custody of the physical assets which remain managed, transferred and kept at IMES in France. With a dedicated technical team mandated to to provide high quality, streamlined and efficient digitisation, the content will be uploaded directly to Canal+’s MAM platform, a bespoke instance of IMES’ Smart Vault digital content repository, so each file can be reviewed, approved and utilised immediately.

The Smart Vault platform provides archiving and long-term preservation of media files. The Canal+ Smart Vault instance interfaces with the team’s production systems, allowing remote review of the digital collection as well as of the related metadata, with a view to enhancing the latter throughout the duration of the project.

The contract also includes an ‘emergency’ provision for up to 10 specific tapes per day to be uploaded if Canal+ needs a particular piece of content urgently. In addition, IMES offers editing services for projects spread over several tapes; for example, footage of a football match residing on three tapes will be edited together to form a single file.

Albert Sellem, director of operations at Canal+, said: “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.”