A PBS station in St. Louis lost access to 50 terabytes of its own archive - more than 70 years of programming, including coverage of the Great Flood of 1993 and the COVID-19 pandemic - the same day its cloud storage contract expired. No warning. The vendor, Open Source Storage, had already gone quiet. When the station went looking for answers, the vendor's website was gone and it was listed as delinquent with the state of Colorado.
Nine PBS had to sue just to get its own footage back. A judge ruled in the station's favor on August 12, ordering the storage facility to cooperate with recovery. Both sides were due to report their progress to the court by September 14 - yesterday.
What actually happened
Nine PBS had stored its archive with the same vendor since 2019, renewing the contract year after year. The agreement gave the station 30 days to retrieve its data after the relationship ended. It didn't get 30 days. It didn't get any days. On the day the contract expired, access was simply cut off.
This wasn't a hack, a natural disaster, or a dispute over the footage itself. A business quietly stopped operating, and decades of irreplaceable material sat on servers the people who made it could no longer reach.
The part that should worry every creator, not just broadcasters
This is a vendor problem, not a PBS problem. Nine PBS did the ordinary, responsible thing: they paid a storage company to hold their archive and trusted the contract. The contract didn't save them, because a contract only protects you if the other party is still around to honor it.
Every creator hosting footage anywhere is making the same bet, usually without thinking about it that way. A platform's terms of service can promise you 30 days' notice, or 90, or none at all - and none of it matters if the company itself disappears first.
Why this is the exact scenario Long Play is built around
Long Play's Permanence Pledge makes two specific commitments, not vague reassurance:
- At least 90 days' advance notice before any significant change to how your content is distributed or accessed.
- If Long Play is ever acquired, merged into another entity, or shuts down entirely, at least 90 days' notice and a one-click export of every original file, before any of that takes effect.
That second promise exists because we thought through this exact failure mode before it happened to us, not after. Library export already works today - it's not a feature we'd have to build in a hurry if the day ever came. Every original file also gets a SHA-256 fingerprint you can independently verify is still intact, so "the file still exists" isn't something you have to take on faith either.
We can't promise Long Play will exist forever - no one honestly can. What we can promise is that if something ever changes, you'll know with real notice, and you'll be able to walk away with everything you made, not just what a vendor felt like letting you keep.
The work comes first
Nine PBS's footage wasn't valuable to Open Source Storage. It was 50 terabytes of line items on a balance sheet that stopped making sense to keep running. That's the quiet risk in outsourcing your archive to any platform whose business model isn't actually about the work: the day it stops being profitable to keep your files online, keeping your files online stops being the priority.
Long Play doesn't have an algorithm to protect, engagement metrics to chase, or an ad business to feed. The entire premise is presenting video properly and keeping it there - which means the footage itself is the whole point, not a byproduct of something else we're trying to monetize. When the two ever pull in different directions, we've already told you which way we go.
Read the full Permanence Pledge and our principles for the complete picture.