Malientu began as a shelf. Three cardboard boxes of tapes in a Pasadena back room, left after a television station closed in 2011. We started digitising them because nobody else would. Five years later the shelf is a rack, and the rack is an archive — still modest, still hand-run, still free.

The dates 1960 to 2010 are not a boundary of taste. They are the window in which moving image was recorded onto physical media — tape, film, laserdisc — by people who had to think carefully before they pressed record. We think that constraint produced a different kind of footage, and we would like more of it to survive.

There is no paid tier, no uploader revenue, no advertising network. If you have a tape, a reel or a disc and nowhere to put it, write to us. We will tell you honestly whether we can preserve it. Nothing is ever sold; everything is mirrored and captioned; small errors are kept intact.