The Alteon team was asked to upload more than 40 years’ worth of award-winning, internationally produced footage from multiple Emmy Award–winning journalist Peter Greenberg to Alteon Cloud.
Greenberg is the travel editor at CBS News and widely regarded as one of the leading experts in travel journalism. He has worked for NBC, PBS, The Travel Channel and The History Channel, and currently hosts a long-running TV series airing on PBS, *The Travel Detective*, as well as a nationally syndicated CBS Radio show, *Eye on Travel, *broadcast each week from a different location around the world.
****Problem****
Throughout his storied career, Greenberg has accumulated thousands of hours of footage on beta tapes, VHS tapes, mini DV tapes, DVDs, audio cassettes, CDs, DVCAM and XDCAM files and external hard drives. Greenberg kept all this in a storage locker—an untenable long-term solution that allowed natural disasters to risk the safety of his life’s work, and kept all his footage hidden away from the public eye.
****Goals****
• Greenberg is developing a number of brand-new travel series that incorporates his archival footage, which requires on-demand access
To eliminate the threat of losing his footage to a fire or natural disaster, Greenberg wants to migrate his assets on a reliable, secure cloud storage platform
Any migration demands a universal, customized organization system to allow him and his colleagues to find assets quickly, regardless of their age, format or content
****Solution****
Greenberg’s team was given a dedicated Alteon customer-success specialist, who helped deliver Greenberg’s complete archive to the Alteon’s content-upload site in Burbank to meticulously catalog everything. Because the majority of footage was recorded on obsolete technology, such as Beta SP, the group had to specially source the necessary hardware to digitize each tape. Careful not to damage what were, in some cases, deteriorating original reels, they had to run through each piece of footage manually
Once all files were digitized, Greenberg’s team began quickly uploading all files to Alteon Cloud, tagging assets by year, show, episode and camera. They created a unique filename structure to organize assets internally, and meta tags to allow for easy searchability from Alteon users.
As part of the process, Alteon will also be introducing A.I. features and speech-to-text trranscriptions.
“It’s incredible how technology has evolved over the decades,” Greenberg said. “Seeing my life’s work reborn in this way, with these wonderful stories and historical documents that I haven’t looked at in years, has been invigorating. I’m grateful to the team at Alteon for making it possible, and I’m excited to see the new programming we will be creating using these valuable videos.”