Milt Shefter is president of Miljoy Ent. Inc., a company that offers media asset preservation and access strategies to those who own large libraries of moving image, recorded sound, and video content. Miljoy helps them to preserve and protect what they now have and develop strategies to deal with issues and problems that may arise in the future. On ‘Film. No Compromise’, the recent Kodak DVD, Shefter talks about preserving images for the future. Here, he expands on those comments.

When I started college, I had an aunt who asked: “What are you going to study?” I said, “Television”. And she said, “That’s wonderful! Television repairmen make so much money. I just had a tube changed last week.” And, then a few years later I got involved with media asset preservation, and my aunt asked: “What is that?” I said, “It’s preservation.” And she said, “Oh, that’s much better. Funeral directors make more money than television repairmen.” She never quite caught on.

In 1986 Ted Turner turned the motion picture industry up side down by purchasing the icon studio Metro Goldwyn Mayer for $1.3 billion dollars. This studio in existence since the early 1920’s with titles in its film library like Gone With The Wind, Wizard of Oz, Dr. Zhivago, 2001 a Space Odyssey and many other classics was falling into the hands of what many said was a crazy man with far too much money. Ted didn’t want the studio lot, nor the film laboratory Metrocolor, all Ted wanted was the vast library that MGM had amassed over the previous 60+ years.

During the next few years Ted Turner proceeded to show the industry what could be done with their library and the literal gold mine that was before them in a fledgling consumer market. By 1990 with Ted’s cable network booming and home video sales growing the other studios were now starting to assess their own libraries in order to emulate what Turner Entertainment was accomplishing.