The folks at Alteran are hard at work moving videotape files to digital media forms. The company was born about a year ago from assets of the Broadcast Store. Alteran President Jean Paul Claude said he acquired all manner of legacy tape players to handle everything from U-matic and Betcam to HDCAM and beyond.

Alteran, based in Chatsworth Calif., partners with Nevada City's Telestream, which handles the transcoding for migrating content from tape to typically drive archiving, though some clients have asked to have their video stored in a more public venue.

"We've been asked to load it on YouTube," said Claude, an IP guy whose background includes work with ColdFusion, an Internet application development platform initially developed to link Web sites to database -- its own form of archiving.

Alteran offers a variety of migratory routes to digitization. Media can be delivered for on site transfer, or Alteran delivers the digitizer -- either the portable ViTaDi Autopack, or the RoboPack with its additional robotic capabilities.

The four-channel RoboPack allows for simultaneous transcoding into different formats for options redundancy. Claude said some clients prefer "guerilla-style" migration... running an extension cord and a RoboPack through the stacks.

by Deborah D. McAdams of TV Technology