Salt Lake City's PushButton 2010 Summit: Storing digital media becoming a major challenge

SALT LAKE CITY — Making the switch from one technology to the next generation can sometimes create problems that are as big as the solutions it provides. Such is the case with digital media storage.

For years, the general public and businesses have enjoyed the benefits of new high-tech developments like CDs and DVDs, which allow hours of audio and video content — or even thousands of pages of text — to be stored in a relatively small area. Now some industry analysts are warning of a potentially dangerous circumstance that could put some of our nation's most cherished artistic treasures at risk if a solution is not found in the very near future.

Speaking Wednesday at PushButton 2010 Summit in downtown Salt Lake City, Milt Shefter, president of Miljoy Inc., a consulting and project management company involved in media asset protection and preservation, said currently there is no efficient and effective way to digitally warehouse the thousands of feature films that exist or are being made.

"Film was a universal standard," he said. "You could photograph (and) process in a laboratory … and project worldwide with the same standards."

Shefter said that as digital technology has become more prevalent, numerous storage formats have created an environment with no generally accepted standard and no way to catalog data.

"When you store (the data), the storage devices (discs and other digital media) degrade and fall apart and therefore we have no long-term access," he said.

He described the current storage issue as "a massive problem."

"The challenges are material data and creative content that is being created today may not be available in as little as 18 months, two years, five years," Shefter said.

He noted that future storage technology will have to be "backward-compatible," where new versions of the technology will still "play" previous generations' versions.

In addition to being a featured speaker at the event, Shefter also participated in a panel discussion on digital media storage. One of the other panel members was Barry Lunt, professor of information technology at BYU and founder of Provo-based Millenniata Inc., a company that provides permanent, backward-compatible archiving products for digital media.

Lunt said his company has developed the M-DISC, which encodes data and images using the M-WRITER drive, that can be preserved virtually permanently by modern standards.