When Legacy Media Archives Hold Back a Global Business
The Challenge
Sony Pictures had accumulated decades of high-value media assets, ranging from original movie poster files to behind-the-scenes production photography, stored on legacy formats like CD-ROMs, DVDs, and floppy disks.
Accessing these assets required manual retrieval, and cataloging was inconsistent.
As a result:
- Teams struggled to locate and verify assets
- Valuable content was underutilized
- Materials were at risk of degradation or loss
What should have been a strategic asset had become a constraint on the business.
“Decades of iconic and fragile content was being locked away
and inaccessible across the organization.”
What We Did
Avalon transformed how Sony accessed and managed its media assets by:
- Assessing legacy media formats and catalog structure
- Designing a scalable digitization and Digital Asset Management (DAM) approach
- Developing custom software and purpose-built hardware for high-speed ingestion
- Establishing metadata standards and tagging governance
- Implementing validation processes to ensure data accuracy
- Training internal teams and supporting ongoing asset integration
“We completed the entire media ingestion in a fraction of the time estimated by every other vendor, delivering assets before the platform was even live.”
Results
- Completed ingestion in ~5% of the time estimated by other vendors
- Delivered assets ahead of DAM platform readiness
- Enabled instant, global access to critical media assets
- Streamlined workflows across marketing, operations, and production teams
Before:
- Manual archive retrieval and limited access
After:
- Searchable, structured, globally accessible content
“The challenge wasn’t technology, it was committing to modernization at the scale the business required.”