LAS VEGAS – Amazon.com, one of the largest online retailers, and its subsidiary, CustomFlix, have initiated a content-repurposing plan that could benefit any producers wishing to reach audiences big or small with DVDs of their product.
The offering, called Media Gateway, is based on CustomFlix’s Future Proof Archive service, a secure storage and reformatting platform designed to provide content owners the flexibility to repurpose content into multiple future digital formats. The Future Proof Archive service currently supports DVD-Video, with additional formats to be announced.
The Media Gateway program enables content owners to unlock the potentially hundreds of thousands of hours of content trapped in analog tape formats, making it immediately available for sale as physical DVDs, and enabling the content for future inventory-free digital formats. For a limited time, Amazon.com and CustomFlix will offer digitization and DVD authoring of qualified content with no up-front investment by the content provider. Amazon.com will then make this content available for sale to tens of millions of Amazon customers and CustomFlix will manufacture DVDs on demand as customers place orders.
"The Media Gateway program isn't just about converting tapes into digital masters and DVDs - it's about a whole new way to manage media distribution," says Dana LoPiccolo-Giles, co-founder and managing director of CustomFlix (www.customflix.com). "The real innovation lies in the Future Proof Archive service. We're digitizing the world's content and storing it in virtually lossless quality, then helping content owners repurpose and deliver their programming in whatever current or future format they select.
This program is meant to benefit producers and content owners large and small. For instance, fans of legacy TV series or old cartoons could cherry-pick their favorite episodes and purchase them as a custom DVD. Indie filmmakers could also use Media Gateway to distribute their own films.