As an avid amateur photographer and videographer, I have often wondered what would happen to the “legacy assets” of the animal TV programs that we more popular in decades past.

Arguably some of the most beautiful photography ever created in history, it could easily become extinct.  Unless, of course, there is an effort made to sustain its context and/or relevance over time.

So when I found this hilarious mashup of older BBC nature footage with comical voices added in audio, I watched it three times.  And after my laughter subsided, I had a set of deeper thoughts connected to one of the main things we do at Convertigo — we help companies preserve the value of legacy IT data and applications, by making it really easy to bring them into the modern architecture with the addition of a simple context layer — the Convertigo Mashup Server.

Modernizing legacy assets has to be easy or it won’t happen.  The reason why this embedded BBC video mashup was created is because there are now modern tools to quickly transform the asset into something new and relevant.  And “quickly” is not months or years.  It’s a span of of time that makes the effort worthwhile.

Sure, not every legacy application and data store warrants the effort required to modernize it.  But in our expereince, nearly every company that has been in existence for more than 5 years has legacy IT assets that aren’t being utilized, and it’s costing that company agility and competitive advantage.