Meet the largest autonomous internet archive for movies, music, and television shows. 

The context

A couple of months ago, I was fiending for Duck Dynasty.

I just couldn't resist the idea of watching rednecks have fun in the woods, whatever that says about my love for chaos. I also think there's something really heartwarming about how each episode wraps up—with a family prayer and some thoughtful reflections on the day's adventures. You don't see that kind of thing much in today's shows.

So, I settled in, turned on the TV, and headed to Hulu. Nothing

Then I tried Netflix—nope, not there either. Paramount+? Still nothing

I started wondering if I needed to buy or rent it. How old is this show again? The cheapest option was Apple TV at $112.94, and Google Play Movies was a whopping $268.89. I checked the usual illicit places as well - not even torrent-able aside from two episodes. 

The year is 2024 and Duck Dynasty is nearly lost media?

The licensing problem

With the rise and ongoing success of subscription-based streaming, modern content licensing can be quite a challenge. The whole system is like a big, bustling industry—it's vast, intricate, and sometimes a bit puzzling. But as viewers and consumers, we only catch a glimpse of it—the parts that directly affect us.

Sometimes this manifests as our favorite NFL games being blacked out...

Or channels that we pay for as premium content up-and-disappearing from our channel guides...

Or songs we've prior saved disappearing from our Spotify playlists...

Point being, in the golden age of the subscription service, licensing is what powers all of this.

So, what about licensing?

When it comes to keeping our favorite media safe and sound, licensing can be a bit tricky. While it's fantastic for ensuring actors get their dues and everyone gets paid—which is super important—it does make preserving media a bit of a puzzle for the future.

With physical copies becoming rarer, it's tough to hold onto a movie, song, or TV show forever. We can only enjoy them as long as the licensing is in place through subscription-based streaming services, and there's no promise that any media will be available forever.

How do we keep media around forever, then?

Well, there's projects like the Internet Archive that currently maintain an absolutely massive data lake ocean comprising movies, songs, podcasts, books, websites, software, and then-some.

However, for as grand of a tale of history as the Internet Archive helps tell, it suffers from its own problems, the primary issues being data consistency and data fidelity. There's so much data, yet so little context, that there's no effective way to control, or interact with, that much data at scale. Anybody from the community can add content; they can also do a garbage job of it. Media can be mis-marked, include contextual errors, misspellings, format errors - infinite possibilities, infinite disorder.

So, the questions we asked were...

How do we build a timeless, comprehensive archive that can scale intelligently and efficiently? How do we collect, organize, define, contextualize, and progressively improve on this for potentially billions of media items? How do we create a truly immutable memory of media?

Meet MEMORYLANE

Aptly named MEMORYLANE, this is the result of months of research, development, and testing in the world of media, entertainment, networking, and pop culture.

This is our next-generation "Internet Archive" for movies, music, and television. 

How's it work?

The exact opposite of the Internet Archive. 

We're shouldering the entire technological investment into media procurement.

Our robots are on the job 24/7, keeping an eye on a variety of media sources, including everything from live TV streams and Usenet groups to public and private torrent indexers, premium on-demand libraries, YouTube channels, and the vast "open internet."

Whenever we spot media that's perfect for our archive, it gets automatically downloaded, analyzed, and spruced up with corrected metadata where available, synced subtitles (if applicable), and markers for intros and/or commercials (if applicable).

Then, it takes a little pit stop in temporary storage on our media server. Here, our awesome content reviewers give it a once-over, and if everything checks out, it moves to cold storage and vanishes from the media server.

What content can it find?

To a reasonable degree, anything that is...

• Any song by an artist with an IPI, or currently trending in media, or an artist who fits both categories.
• Any TV show or episode that has aired or will air on a live TV channel or streaming platform. We typically obtain new episodes within 4 hours of their initial broadcast or upload, but have prior gotten them up to 2 hours before release.
• Any movie that was "an official act of production", even if it didn't make it to the box office. Consider films from independent studios. Don't consider the random skate video you uploaded to YouTube when you were 8. 

Currently, we focus on movies, music, and television.

In the future, we might expand to include books. If we did pivot to archiving books, we'd want to ensure we had a groundwork for analyzing and parsing them all at-scale to be able to utilize them in hopefully more intelligent ways.

How do you choose what to archive?

Our own team along with our awesome content reviewers and some of our special supporters can request movies, music, and TV shows to be added to our archive. We love to focus on media that's both culturally relevant and significant.

How is content maintained?

If you're an artist, once we know you exist our systems will keep an eye on your work until you stop making music or, sadly, pass away. If that happens, we'll get a heads-up and make sure your entire discography is safely archived (unless your label has plans for posthumous releases, at which point then we'll let those release and then...y'know..."box you up").

For TV shows and live TV broadcasts, we'll keep track of the newest episodes and seasons, making sure they're all neatly cataloged and organized as they come out. Once content is complete, reviewed, and error free, we'll move it to our cold storage.

When it comes to movies, we'll grab the best quality versions as they become available after their official premiere, whether they're from indie studios or big box office hits. Once the movie's relatively irrelevant, we'll move it to cold storage.

Who reviews content?

We've assembled an elite team of misfits who are expert music listeners and television watchers from all around the world. 

What quality is it stored in?

We store media in the best quality we can get from the source, and depending on the content and its age that can vary. For movies, that's usually around BluRay quality. For shows that only stream online, it's typically a 1080p web stream (or 4k if we can get it). For music, we aim for WAV/FLAC, but if that's not available, we go with the highest available quality MP3.

How's it secured?

It's the internet archive that belongs to a security organization. Answer is "well". 

What's the benefit?

For our own internal and analytical purposes, the possibilities are endless; this is one more odd, and persistent, route of ingress for us to absorb more information and become more intelligent about the world.

For the general public, keeping an immutable memory of media will allow for easier access from researchers and higher-quality production coverage of old media.

If you're interested in learning more about MEMORYLANE, you can click here to read the project page. As the project develops, we'll have more to share.