Sony Is Building a Digital Library

Sony Pictures Entertainment is expected to announce today the creation of an all-digital library for its valuable video footage, the first of its kind for a major Hollywood studio.

The library, which Ascent Media Group Inc. of Santa Monica is running with technology from Hewlett-Packard Co of Palo Alto, stores Sony’s films and television shows as high-quality digital files on computers, not videotape or reels of film.

The point, said Jeff Hargleroad, a senior vice president at Sony Corp.’s Sony Pictures, is to help the studio respond faster to the growing demand for digital versions of its movies and TV shows. The library’s digital files can be converted automatically into the formats needed for global DVD releases and digital cable TV, as well as such emerging applications as Internet downloads and hand-held video players.

Ultimately, the library is expected to help Sony deliver movies and TV shows to people wherever and whenever they want to view them. That goal, however, is being held back more by business considerations than by technology, executives at Sony and Ascent said.

Studios have been making digital masters of their films for years, typically storing them on tape. Shifting from tapes to Ascent’s digital storehouse makes it much easier for Sony to generate the different versions it needs and to deliver them in a highly secure way, Hargleroad said.

Many industry executives say their studios will ultimately store everything in digital libraries. Some are holding off, however, because they fear that rapidly changing technology could render whatever they do today obsolete within five years.

Time Warner Inc.’s Warner Bros. Studios, meanwhile, has been working on a more sweeping digitization project with HP. HP is expected to announce today that it is working with Warner Bros. on a “digital end-to-end” system that will cover not just storing and distributing movies but also creating them.

What makes Sony unusual, Ascent Chief Executive Ken Williams said, is that its efforts are so far along. “There are over 500 film and television titles ingested in this system,” he said.

Hargleroad said the company hoped to have 80% of its marketable video collection in the new library over the next year. That percentage, however, does not include the 4,000 films and 10,000 television episodes that Sony just acquired in its $5-billion buyout of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc.

Neither Sony nor Ascent, a subsidiary of Liberty Media Corp., would disclose how much the library service costs. But executives said the effort would save Sony money in the long term by reducing the cost of delivering the company’s movies and TV programs to distributors.

The system developed by Ascent and HP converts video on film or tape into digital files stored on high-capacity hard drives. It then adds tags that divide the video into scenes, identify key cast and crew members, and provide other descriptions that make it easier to search through or edit the contents.

For example, a filmmaker could search through the library for “everything that has the Eiffel Tower in it,” said Vikki Pachera, vice president of global alliances and business development at HP.

The library makes it easy to pull scenes from older films and reuse them in contemporary films, as well as to reformat scenes or entire films for new devices, Pachera said.

Sony is not abandoning film, at least not yet. It still delivers most of its movies to theaters on reels of film, and it preserves movies in its archives on film, not as bytes of data.