A PBS station in St. Louis is taking a data center provider to court to retrieve what the station says is “more than 70 years of history.”

In a lawsuit filed with the Denver District Court against Iron Mountain Data Centers in late July, Nine PBS (KETC) says that Iron Mountain is refusing to release more than 50 TB of archived programming housed at Iron Mountain's data center in Denver. According to the lawsuit, Open Source Storage, the cloud service hosting the archives, went out of business earlier this year and shut off Nine PBS’s access to its material.

Iron Mountain says since OSS owned “the physical services housing the data,” it would not return access to the archives to Nine PBS, according to a story in Current.

The district court judge granted Nine PBS’s request to prevent Iron Mountain from deleting, modifying or overwriting the archives and a hearing was held on Wednesday.

In a statement to Current, Nine PBS Vice President and Chief Content Officer Leah Freemansaid the broadcaster is “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.”

Nine PBS had a contract with OSS (identified in the lawsuit as OSS’ predecessor’) starting in 2019 and said in its lawsuit that it had not received any response from OSS earlier this year when it attempted to renew its contract for 2026. Although the contract required 30 days notice before termination, the lawsuit claims that OSS abruptly ended Nine PBS’s access to its archives on March 6 and that it was only after this that the broadcaster discovered that the cloud provider had gone out of business.

Iron Mountain told TV Tech that it "has acted appropriately and responsibly at every step to safeguard customer data and honor our contractual commitments to OSS. Throughout this process, we have been transparent with Nine PBS about our role in this dispute, that we do not have access to their data, and we have made consistent efforts to help them resolve the issue."

Tom has covered the broadcast technology market for the past 25 years, including three years handling member communications for the National Association of Broadcasters followed by a year as editor of Video Technology News and DTV Business executive newsletters for Phillips Publishing. In 1999 he launched digitalbroadcasting.com for internet B2B portal Verticalnet. He is also a charter member of the CTA's Academy of Digital TV Pioneers. Since 2001, he has been editor-in-chief of TV Tech (www.tvtech.com), the leading source of news and information on broadcast and related media technology and is a frequent contributor and moderator to the brand’s Tech Leadership events.