“More than 1 billion hours of high value media has yet to be digitized,” explains Mark Gray, CEO of SAMMA Systems. “How much of the world’s history and culture is going to be lost?”

Every year, more of the world’s archives are lost to analog tape deterioration, and SAMMA is using the 2009 digital mandate to call the industry to take action and digitize their archives before it is too late.

“The archivers of the world really get this,” Gray says, “but the broadcasters are just beginning to. You’ve got to deliver your content in many different forms and packages, but it’s all digital. You cannot repurpose or edit your content unless you convert everything from analog.”

The window for saving archival materials is steadily closing, and SAMMA is urging broadcasters to do something about it.

“We’ve lost over half of the silent film that’s ever been made,” explains Jim Lindner, chairman and founder of SAMMA Systerms. “But they have an excuse – they didn’t know any better. We don’t have an excuse.”

The SAMMA Robot, currently in use and on display at IBM’s booth at NAB, means broadcasters have no excuse. SAMMA’s solution for mass migration of videotaped recordings to digital files, The Robot can migrate 1,000 hours of content per week, making for an efficient digitizing process. The SAMMA Solo, a videotape-to-digital file migration solution, prevents tape from entering the workflow in the first place. Both products are on display at NAB.

SAMMA is in talks with several potential clients in the sports industry, and hopes to have at least one deal inked by the end of the show.