ABSTRACT
The audiovisual content industry stands at a crossroads at the writing of this chapter in 2016. Time is ticking on existing collections of audio and moving image content. We are at a technology crossroads spawned by fundamental changes in how content is captured, edited, distributed and archived. It is a survival crossroads for both the content that has come before and the content created from here on. The content created over the past century-plus since recording was invented lives on ephemeral carriers made of substances that don’t last more than about 5 years to 5 decades. Even if something has survived the self-editing already done by how collections of content have been created, stored and, many times, discarded, the very medium on which content is recorded was and is decaying from within. With the conversion to digital the challenge is even more difficult: not only the media on which digital recordings survive over time but their survival depends on all of us doing our best to make the content self-identifying, keep the documentation and expertise to replay the content extant, and accept the reality that recordings that we want to last “forever” must be copied from time to time or they will be lost.
