Heidi Shakespeare IMES Europe at Iron Mountain Director and general manager
What are the main challenges facing the media industry right now? The sheer volume of content that is created on a daily basis. This influx leads to issues when deciding how best to manage and store it, and what will have the most future value. There’s a need to address legacy content trapped in deteriorating formats, and scale up the digital transformation process to ensure this isn’t lost forever. The task will be to make accounts and finance departments aware of the importance of restoring historical content, to preserve its cultural legacy for the future. Tell us your hopes for 2022. I hope Covid-19 will be relegated to the history books, and the world will open up again, meeting with people face-to-face rather than virtually. This move would unlock the potential of a generation of twentysomethings, who have never stepped foot in an office, or met their teams in person. Hopefully, these workers can experience what it is like to be part of a team, and learn together in person. We can never underestimate the education of working alongside someone. What are the three most useful pieces of technology for your business? Zoom and G Suite are essential for keeping our global team in contact with each other, and clients worldwide. The consistency of these services is part of the ‘IMES experience’ that enables our teams to coordinate work, and our clients to trust us with assets. Due to the international scale of IMES, these services will continue to be crucial. Given we all spend endless hours on video calls, I’d have to mention AirPods, too. Taking care of mental health and wellbeing has become a huge priority
THERE’S A NEED TO ADDRESS LEGACY CONTENT TRAPPED IN DETERIORATING FORMATS
over the past 18 months, with people working extended hours, as we all now sleep in our offices. Headphones have been a lifeline, so we can ‘walk and talk’ in the way we used to do when going for coffee with a colleague. One of the core aspects of the business relies on the ability to properly remediate, capture and digitise old tape media. This requires careful design and build-out, marrying machines that can be 30 to 40 years old with a chain of devices that technologically time-travel the signal into a capture rig, outputting a 21st- century, digital form of media. It’s always fun to see the hit of nostalgia on visitors’ faces when they come to our studios. If you could invent any technology, what would it be? In terms of world-changing technology: a battery that is safe, inexpensive and with volumetric energy density greater than that of a fuel tank. We’re in the middle of an energy revolution, with renewables quickly outpacing traditional energy sources in terms of economic viability and flexibility – but the fundamental issue of energy storage is not solved yet. Looking at preservation, it would be amazing to develop a digital storage solution with long-term durability (thousands of years) under conditions of neglect. Almost all the information produced nowadays is stored digitally, on primarily magnetic media – disk
or tape. These are inherently fragile physical formats, requiring specialised, high-precision equipment to be read. While we have developed very effective methods to get around data fragility issues (replication methodologies, erasure coding, geographic separation of duplicates, etc) the vulnerability is still there; this all requires very active maintenance measures – neglect of any sort is not a valid option. The 21st century needs its own version of clay tablets. What is the piece of analogue technology your business has got the most use out of? Ovens are an invaluable part of our tape remediation process. As tapes age, the binder undergoes slow hydrolysis – the active part absorbs water; this changes its composition, leading to reduced adhesion of the binder to the substrate, causing it to detach, stick to the tape above it, or fall off. Baking tapes at a low temperature drives water out of the binder, restoring it to a readable condition. As far as media conversion goes, our 3/4in decks, one-inch VTRs (for video), and 1/4in and two-inch audio decks (Ampex ATR, Studer, Otari) are also kept busy! There is an immense amount locked in old analogue tape formats, and as clients undertake initiatives to revive these gems and give them a digital life, the old machines are called to duty for playback and capture.
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