What happens to viral content once the hype fades?
One week, it’s everywhere. The next, it’s buried under another trending moment — lost in camera rolls, email threads, and expired stories.
But what if it didn’t have to be that way?
Today, the biggest moments in sports & entertainment are captured from scores of angles, most of them vertical and on a phone. The rise of short-form content has transformed how fans experience highlights, behind-the-scenes access, and historic milestones. What used to be carefully produced, broadcast-only footage is now supplemented (and sometimes replaced) by authentic, creator-driven video from every seat in the house.
These clips are created and leveraged as quickly as the moment passes, and while they’re an incredibly impactful storytelling mechanism, their long-term value is only as good as the solution in place to extend their shelf life. Basically, brands need to have a plan for how their teams can make the most of this content after the moment has come and gone.
The Challenge: Real-Time Content vs. Long-Term Archiving
Social content today moves fast. Creators, digital teams, and social managers are optimizing for real-time relevance. The formats are vertical. The tone is raw. The shelf life is short
On the flip side, most archival systems — especially within sports leagues, teams, and entertainment organizations — are built for something very different: high-resolution, horizontal footage, cataloged and stored with long-term discoverability in mind.
There’s a fundamental disconnect.
So, how do you bridge the gap between the content that drives culture today and the content that tells history tomorrow?
Enter: Greenfly + Iron Mountain
Iron Mountain Media and Archival Services, the industry leader in secure, long-term content storage, has partnered with Greenfly to create a seamless way for brands to turn real-time content into long-term, discoverable assets.
Here’s how it works:
- Greenfly powers the capture and distribution of short-form video from creators, athletes, fans, and social teams, with AI tagging and organization built in
- Iron Mountain provides the enterprise-grade infrastructure to store, protect, and manage these assets indefinitely
- Together, they create a pipeline where short-form content is not just saved, but made archive-ready, tagged with metadata, centralized, and accessible to both marketing teams and brand historians
Preserving Today’s Clips for Tomorrow’s Documentaries
What does that look like in action?
- The team commemorating Kobe Bryant’s legacy can layer fan-shot footage and creator content from the archive with broadcast clips to create an emotive compilation of his most memorable moments
- When LeBron James broke the NBA scoring record, content from phones in the arena was captured, shared instantly, and archived for future use
- UGC captured at concerts or behind the scenes on tour is now being stored with pro-level metadata, making it searchable for future productions
This shift isn’t just about nostalgia. It’s about future-proofing your brand’s ability to tell compelling stories years from now, whether that’s in a social media tribute, a streaming documentary, or a digital museum.
Content That Lives Beyond the Feed
Digital teams and league historians rarely sit at the same table, but they should. With Greenfly and Iron Mountain, they finally can.
This partnership makes it possible to capture the energy of today’s moments and ensure it’s part of the historical record, not lost in the cloud.
Viral content is not a passing fad. As its lifecycle moves faster and faster, it’s more important than ever that brands have a plan in place to harness the power of nostalgia.
