HBO plans to rescue its sports content from deteriorating videotapes

HBO has a plan to save its decades of sports content from deteriorating videotapes by tapping Wazee Digital to help digitize and archive the old films.

In addition to saving the content, HBO will offer access to the content to certain stakeholders, including credentialed internal HBO users.

"Many of HBO Sports' assets are on legacy tape formats that need to be migrated to digital because the physical formats are deteriorating, and the videotape machines that play them back are quickly becoming extinct," said HBO Vice President Michael Castro in a statement. "HBO Sports now has access to its rich history of sports content digitally, unearthing what has long been dormant, sitting on a shelf. Through Wazee Digital, we are rediscovering these historic moments and making them available for future use."

RELATED: College Football Playoff taps Wazee for digital media hub

HBO is using Wazee Digital’s software-as-a-service platform Core to preserve its analog and digital videotape formats using AS-02 MXF versioning.

"Core gives HBO a market-leading cloud asset management platform that provides HBO complete control of their precious content — both endangered and recently produced. With Core, HBO now has a progressive solution that allows them to archive, manage, research, view, download, and share sports content that otherwise may have languished on shelves in tape format," said Harris Morris, chairman and CEO of Wazee Digital. "The support of AS-02 archive format using JPEG 2000 is the first of its kind for a cloud-native asset management platform. This strategy will help HBO Sports bring its rich history of sports content back to life, while making it searchable, discoverable, and monetizable once again."

HBO users will now be able to log in to Core to search and explore the archive and download the newly digital assets. The initial deployment covers aging HBO Sports archives, enabling producers at HBO Sports to download those video assets for editing in sports programs.