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Unlocking Legacy Media Archives for a Global Media Company

Unlocking Legacy Media Archives for a Global Media Company

We partnered with a leading global media and entertainment company to resolve critical challenges stemming from fragmented legacy archive systems. Our work helped restore access to decades of historical metadata, enabling rights verification, content reuse and the preservation of institutional knowledge. Through custom dashboards and data visualization tools, we transformed inaccessible data into a dynamic, future-ready resource—ultimately helping the world’s largest entertainment archive unlock its full potential.

Challenge

A prominent global media and entertainment company faced significant operational risk due to decades of legacy metadata locked away in outdated archival systems. Decentralized and inconsistently documented, this metadata had undergone numerous migrations across obsolete platforms and proprietary databases, many of which were decommissioned without proper archival oversight. 

 

These unverified and incomplete migrations posed immediate risks, including: 

  • Lost rights and provenance data 
  • Gaps in compliance and legal documentation 
  • Diminished asset readiness for digitization or monetization 
  • Potential loss of cultural and historical legacy 

 

Moreover, with the industry’s shift toward monetizing legacy content for streaming and emerging rights management complexities, the archival function needed a solution that could not only reconcile and structure historic data but also serve evolving commercial and legal needs. 

Solution

Working closely with the internal archival function, we brought our expertise in digital asset management, archival metadata and data engineering to help solve the client’s challenges. We conducted a comprehensive audit of legacy systems and data sets, spanning multiple decades and formats. 

 

Key components of our solution included: 

  • Data triaging and remediation to identify and salvage metadata from decommissioned systems, including reconstructing schema from partial backups and legacy tables. 
  • Transformation pipelines tailoring data connectors to reconcile idiosyncratic legacy structures and unify disparate data sources into a clean, standardized format. 
  • Interactive dashboards in Tableau that enabled visualization metadata across millions of records—making information searchable, filterable and exportable, supporting the work of legal, research and preservation functions. 
  • Alignment on preservation strategy to ensure data structures are consistent with best practices to promote ongoing digitization, AI-readiness and cloud storage considerations. 

 

Our approach addressed not just technical challenges, but also organizational ones—bringing cohesion to an archive that had grown through acquisitions and parallel operations. 

Outcome

We brought a blend of archival science, advanced data handling and UX design to help turn a risk-laden archival backlog into a monetizable, researchable and compliant asset—securing the entertainment company’s past while enabling its digital future. 

 

We helped the archival group: 

  • Reclaim decades of institutional knowledge and recover critical asset provenance lost in past migrations. 
  • Validate rights and manage complex usage agreements with confidence—critical in an era of region- and format-specific licensing. 
  • Prioritize digitization efforts based on content condition, strategic value and monetization potential. 
  • Equip archival staff and executives with user-friendly access to robust metadata—supporting both day-to-day operations and long-term strategy. 
  • Lay the groundwork for future AI and machine learning applications by structuring data in a way that ensures integrity, traceability and auditability. 

 

Our client appreciated the combination of industry understanding and technical know-how we delivered in helping them introduce structure and efficiency among their media assets. 

 

“SolomonEdwards helped us reclaim decades of legacy metadata—some of which had been fragmented or nearly lost through past migrations—and transformed it into a structured, accessible and sustainable resource.

Their work has made our archival data not only usable, but strategic. We now have the ability to support rights validation, preservation and monetization in ways that simply weren’t possible before.”

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