Archiving the World’s Greatest Entertainment Collection

You might think you have a pretty sweet entertainment setup. You might even believe you’ve got the best collection of music and movies this side of anywhere. You have no idea. Just ask Iron Mountain.

Think about the shelf you may have in the living room stocked full of CDs. Maybe you have pretty eclectic taste, say with everything from the Beatles and Frank Sinatra to Megadeth and MC Hammer. You just might have all four of rapper Chingy’s studio albums too.

The next shelf down might be movies. Perhaps you’re an Elvis fan, with “Blue Hawaii” and “Viva Las Vegas”. It might even be the whole Quentin Tarantino collection. Even “From Dusk Till Dawn”.

If all of those were to be lost, it would be tragic, but a quick trip to the store or some online shopping could replace almost everything. You might even be able to find someone willing to part with their copy of “Down Thru Durr,” Chingy’s modern classic.

However, not all of the music and movies in the world are as easily replaceable. At least not before Iron Mountain came around.

What if all the masters copies were destroyed? What if the only remaining copy of a movie was on Laserdisc or Betamax or, gasp, VHS? That’s where Iron Mountain’s Entertainment Services division comes to the rescue. They have the digitized  original masters for nearly everything produced on a Hollywood lot or in a sound studio, and the capability and capacity to store whatever format is thrown at them.

One college library can hold a lot of information. Four years after stepping on campus, even the most ambitious undergrad will have hardly touched the surface of the content in that library. Iron Mountain’s 2 petabyte – or nearly 2.1 million gigabytes – Digital Content Repository can hold more entertainment content than every research library in the United States. Combined.

By preserving most of the entertainment media produced in Hollywood, Iron Mountain has become the go-to resource for the industry. Capitol Records alone has 10,000 square feet for its music, representing over one million tapes. Anything from digital master copies to 1890s wire recordings can be converted to the latest technology film conversion before being put safely away from the elements with the capability to playback 140 obsolete audio and video formats.

Iron Mountain’s massive physical and digital archive is undoubtedly the greatest media library the world has ever known.

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