#ketc

Matthew Keys at The Desk:

A PBS member station in Missouri is suing a data storage center after a cloud-based solution went offline earlier this year, leaving the broadcaster unable to access more than five decades worth of archive video footage. The lawsuit was filed in late January by the operators of KETC (Channel 9), which goes by the name Nine PBS. The case is being heard in Denver because the cloud storage provider, Open Source Storage, used servers located at a Colorado facility owned by Iron Mountain Data Centers.

[...] KETC Vice President and Chief Content Officer Leah Freeman confirmed the lawsuit in a statement to the website Current, which first broke the story this week.

“We are committed to ensuring we can recover and restore full access to this valuable content, which Nine PBS rightfully owns, as it holds significant historical importance for St. Louis,” Freeman said. Freeman said the materials span more than 70 years of the station’s history. According to the lawsuit, the blocked data includes archival coverage of East St. Louis, the COVID-19 pandemic and the Great Flood of 1993. KETC entered into a relationship with a company described in the complaint as OSS’ predecessor in 2019. That vendor provided hardware, software and cloud-storage services for the station’s archival materials and other data. KETC renewed its contracts with that vendor and later OSS on an annual basis. The station says it attempted to schedule a meeting with OSS in February to discuss renewal for 2026 but received no response. The agreement was set to expire March 6 and provided 30 days for KETC to retrieve its data after termination. Instead, KETC says OSS cut off access without warning on the expiration date.

[...] KETC says Iron Mountain eventually acknowledged it had the data but later refused to return it, citing OSS’ ownership of the infrastructure. The station says it “had no choice but to file this lawsuit” to force Iron Mountain to protect and provide the materials.

St. Louis PBS affiliate KETC (Nine PBS) files a lawsuit over 50TB worth of data featuring 70 years in its archives being inaccessible and potentially lost due to Iron Mountain’s irresponsibility and Open Source Storage going defunct.

This is a lesson learned: follow the 3-2-1 rule of archiving.

See Also:

Gizmodo: PBS Station Sues to Regain Access to 70 Years of Archival TV History

I *just* realized that Gregg Berger aka Cornfed Pig from Duckman aka Jecht from Final Fantasy X aka Cutthroat Bill from Curse of Monkey Island... also worked on the widely syndicated, St. Louis-produced PBS phonics show "The Letter People," which taught me to read by the time I was three. In addition to playing several letter people himself (including Mr. V, the smoothest, suavest motherfucker in the alphabet in his Violet Velvet Vest), he also had a standout performance as the poor experimental word machine that Miss O fucking tortured by forcing it to try applying conventional short vowel logic to words like "cold" or "to" or "word" despite his literal *constant* pleas for her to stop as he belches smoke all over the laboratory. Girlboss gets the goods as usual. It's all on YouTube. Seriously, check out that Mr. V episode. Wait for his introductory song to wrap up, then listen as that velvety sum'bitch learns your ass on what the voiced labiodental fricative is all about.