Los angeles lakers create a secure, future-proof, fan-friendly video archive

A secure, future-proof, fan-friendly video archive

Challenge:

Collect, digitize and secure decade's worth of video content while ensuring its ongoing accessibility

Solution:

Iron Mountain Digital Content Repository

Results:

• Preserved the organization's heritage
• Enhanced the fan experience
• Improved the accessibility and security of video footage

The Los Angeles Lakers is one of the most successful and popular teams in the National Basketball Association (NBA). In 65-plus years, the team has won 16 championships, developed a rich history — headlined by such legends as Jerry West, Magic Johnson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Kobe Bryant — and built a global fan base. In order to continue cultivating this heritage and delivering new experiences to its fans, the Lakers initiated a media consolidation, digitization and preservation project with Iron Mountain.

Preserve the past, protect the future

A family-run organization, the Lakers prides itself on delivering a compelling fan experience — both on and off the court. The vast video library chronicling the team’s rich and storied history is an important facet of this effort. But as the Lakers transitioned between television contracts, its video content became spread across multiple locations — making it tough to know where its media resided or if it was properly stored.

With a change in television contracts looming, it offered the Lakers an opportunity to both centralize and better protect its media archives. And with advances in technology making digital conversion, storage and distribution easier, the team also wanted to use these techniques to offer a wider range of video content to its fan base.

"We were looking for a leading-edge, forward-thinking company that understood the goals we wanted to achieve. And that's what we've found with Iron Mountain - a partner that knew how to protect and preserve our content and help us make it fan friendly."

TIM HARRIS, SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT, BUSINESS OPERATIONS AND CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER

“We realized that a lot of our historical footage was with our broadcast partners, rather than in house,” explains Tim Harris, Senior Vice President, Business Operations and Chief Operating Officer of the Los Angeles Lakers. “So, we wanted to create a video archive that collects and protects our history, uses the latest technologies and allows us to control how we use the footage going forward.”

To make these goals a reality, the team partnered with Iron Mountain to build and implement a media consolidation, digitization and preservation project.

A media archive goldmine

The first step in the project was to collect all of the team’s content, including media that was already preserved in an Iron Mountain vault, as well as tapes that were being stored by previous broadcast partners. For the latter, Iron Mountain securely transported the content between locations — with a documented chain-of-custody — and cleaned and quality checked all media.

Iron Mountain then converted the media to a common format and preserved it in its Digital Content Repository (DCR), a leading-edge digital asset management tool, creating a complete, secure, accessible catalog of the organization’s content.

This archived footage — which includes over 5,000 hours of highlight reels, full games and related media — can be accessed from the DCR by the Lakers, its television partners and potentially even fans or other media outlets, via an easy-to-use, Web-based interface. And, the DCR has become the primary repository for current content that is “born digital.”

"The solution puts all of our content into a single archive," Harris says. "This offers many opportunities to expand the fan experience, whether that's by providing access to past footage, using it to drive attendance or putting highlights on our Web site."

All content in the DCR is managed in a secure online storage environment and kept on long-lasting, high-capacity tapes. Iron Mountain stores one copy in the library for easy access and sends duplicates to secure, environmentally controlled, geographically dispersed facilities. What’s more, the digitized content is routinely checked and migrated by a proprietary robotic system to ensure the health of every tape is up to par.

Protect, preserve, and promote content

Iron Mountain provided the digitization expertise, secure chain-of-custody and trusted partnership the Lakers needed to feel confident that its heritage is protected for the long term.

More importantly, the DCR solution helps the Lakers maintain full control over its video archives, empowering the team to decide how content is consumed — both now and into the future.

For example, the Lakers can now integrate archived footage with current-season broadcasts, further enhancing the fan experience. Plus, the DCR creates the potential for monetization opportunities, which the team may use to build additional revenue streams.

“We were looking for a leading-edge, forward-thinking company that understood the goals we wanted to achieve,” says Harris. “And that’s what we’ve found with Iron Mountain — a partner that knew how to protect and preserve our content and help us make it fan friendly.”

"We wanted to create a video archive that collects and protects our history."

Tim Harris - Senior Vice President