A benefit of being the HBO Archives is that you're the HBO Archives. When Time magazine acquired Home Box Office in 1973, the two main programming threads were movies and sports. In addition to content from HBO documentaries, entertainment news magazines and original films and series, HBO Archives has footage from Boxing After Dark, On the Record with Bob Costas, Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel and three decades of Inside the NFL.

Recent acquisitions range from Time Inc.'s March of Time newsreel series to 35mm stock assets from original series like John From Cincinnati and Rome, but the big news is a 13,000-tape influx from the vaults of The Talk Show, Behind the Scenes and World Entertainment Report.

"We had big entertainment news division on the West Coast in the '80s. They covered a lot of events: comedy, sports, premieres, celebrity stuff," says HBO Archives director Max Segal. "When that office closed in the mid-'90s, all that footage stayed out there. We never had a reason to repurpose any of it until we started the archives."

The footage is a mishmash of formats: 2-inch, 1-inch, 3/4-inch U-Matic, and Betacam. Once tapes are received at HBO Archives, staffers review and index them with simple descriptions. Tapes with mixed content are set aside for further examination.

"We take our cataloging very seriously, so we don't have anyone else doing it for us," says Segal. "If you're a filmmaker and you need to find something, you want to go somewhere with deeply catalogued footage."

With the library's customer base expanding as fast as the library itself, it's not just documentary producers looking to license material anymore. Shows including Law & Order, The Oprah Winfrey Show and 60 Minutes, and even feature films like 2009's 2012, have turned to the HBO Archives for their stock footage needs.

Segal's goal isn't just to offer filmmakers the most diverse library possible; he wants to offer the content at the highest quality possible. To this end, all of the standard-definition material is transferred to DigiBeta in-house. ("It doesn't make sense to up-res them to HD. There's not enough information there," Segal remarks.) 35mm footage is transferred to HD for dust and scratch removal at one of the many post facilities in New York City.

At this point, there's almost too much footage coming in for the HBO Archives to handle. "There are parts of the HBO library we haven't even touched yet," Segal says. "This job can be a real treasure hunt sometimes. A lot of this is stuff no one's seen before, and you don't know if anyone ever will see it, but the fact that it's there and you can watch it if you want to is pretty amazing."