The Texas Archive of the Moving Image (TAMI) in Austin has completed a major preservation effort funded by a competitive grant from the Texas Historical Foundation (THF), safeguarding 200 at-risk videotapes from KPRC 2 Houston.
The project, awarded in 2024, focused on rescuing deteriorating tapes from KPRC’s extensive news and production library. TAMI announced that all 200 tapes have now been digitized, preserved, and made publicly available, delivering fresh access to key moments in Houston and Texas history.
"We believe the KPRC collection is one of the most complete archives of local news in the U.S., spanning 1961 to 2010," TAMI Managing Director Elizabeth Hansen told mikemcguff.com. "It lets viewers experience Houston—and Texas—history as it happened. Preserving it takes skilled technicians and catalogers, plus funding to maintain aging equipment and cover essential behind-the-scenes costs like servers, offsite backups, streaming infrastructure, and web hosting—keeping this invaluable resource safe, searchable, and accessible for all."
The newly digitized materials include coverage of Houston events, such as:
- Major weather events, including the impact of Hurricane Alicia (1983).
- Footage documenting the local impact of national issues, such as the Gulf Fishing Fight involving Vietnamese immigrants and local fishermen.
- Historic cultural debuts like the Menil Collection, the Wortham Theater Center, and Rendez-vous Houston.
- Key moments in Houston sports history, including the Astros' first NLCS appearance (1980).
- Iconic pop culture, featuring the star-studded premiere of Urban Cowboy.
While the completed project marks a significant step forward, TAMI says the scale of the preservation challenge remains enormous. The organization is working to digitize tens of thousands of KPRC films and videos, part of an archive that began accumulating roughly 700 hours of content per year in the late 1960s and continued at that pace for 40 years. That translates to an estimated 28,000 hours of footage requiring inventory, digitization, and cataloging.
TAMI estimates that Texas’s local TV stations collectively produced more than 3,000 years of content during the pre-digital era. For KPRC-TV alone, approximately 71,000 items remain undigitized — a multi-million-dollar undertaking that could take more than 4 decades to complete. While the film might last 40 years, the videotapes are estimated to have around one to two decades before they are unusable!
To help accelerate the work, TAMI is launching a GivingTuesday fundraising push on December 2, aiming to raise $3,000 for its next round of digitization. An anonymous donor has pledged to match all contributions, doubling the impact of each gift.
TAMI says community support is critical to ensuring that thousands of hours of Texas history don’t remain trapped on aging, fragile tape.
Last year, I covered a TAMI event held at the Midtown Arts & Theater Center, Houston (MATCH), called "Tonight at 7" Houston Television From The Archive, featuring TAMI's extensive KPRC 2 and KHOU 11 collections.
