The professional television industry started to desire a non-proprietary file format in the mid 1990s, as a substrate for the transition of television recording from analog to digital, and from videotape to spinning disks to network. Much of the development of this standard file format was carried out by SMPTE, and resulted in the publication of the SMPTE 377 Material Exchange Format (MXF), initially in 2004 and with updates in 2011 and since. MXF has become the predominant media file format for professional applications.
In the last several years, work has been underway, sponsored by the Library of Congress and others, defining a profile of the MXF standard to address Archive and Preservation Applications. This is nearing publication under the name "AS-07".
This paper reviews some of the lessons learned in our pursuit of a format that benefits from manufacturing momentum, and also addresses archival needs for stability and longevity. Specific examples discussed include carriage of timecode and captions formats (both legacy and emerging), and migration for analog tape formats through to current and future generations of data tape formats.