From the Polo Grounds to modern day Candlestick Park, the San Francisco Giants are a storied franchise with a history that spans shorelines from New York to California. The Giants recently partnered with Iron Mountain to digitally transform 100 years’ worth of audio and video baseball history.
Iron Mountain specializes in media storage, digitization and restoration services. The company will digitally convert, catalog and store the Giants’ media collection so that key moments can be available for generations of Giants fans to come. This past August, Iron Mountain also relocated the Giants’ collection of audio, film and video assets from San Francisco to a secure, climate-controlled vault in Los Angeles.
“As the production team of the San Francisco Giants, we’re tasked with not only creating original content, but capturing and preserving the history of the club,” said Paul Hodges, vice president of SFG Productions, in a press release. “This project with Iron Mountain allows us to bring nearly 100 years of Giants history into the future through the digitization of over 18,000 tapes.”
Preserving these old moments is a race against time, as video and audio files can be damaged as the material they are physically recorded on begins to deteriorate, according to Joe Waimrin, Director of North American Sales at Iron Mountain Entertainment Services. Without actively preserving the files, content could be lost forever. Waimrin says his team mostly sees old formats such as VHS, cassette, DVD, and three-quarter-inch recording tape. These older formats are typically moved across onto a newer magnetic tape storage system called linear tape-open.
“We’re playing these tapes in our studio, but as we’re playing it we are converting it into whatever format is required so that the Giants’ fanbase can actually see what happened in 1925,” Waimrin said. “You need to have the ability to take those formats and convert them into today’s digital viewing capabilities. An LTO is much more reliable than having it sit on a cassette or video.”
SportTechie Takeaway
For baseball fans, this partnership ensures the preservation of iconic Giants moments such as Bobby Thomson’s “Shot Heard ‘Round the World,” or the historic careers of Willie Mays and Barry Bonds. Whether inside the ballpark or elsewhere, the Giants will also have the opportunity to distribute this content to fans.