A look inside Austin PBS’ Austin City Limits TV show, and how all 50 seasons are being digitized

AUSTIN (KXAN) — The longest-running music program in television history is based in Austin, airing weekly on Austin PBS, and it’s celebrating its 50th anniversary this year.

We’re talking about Austin City Limits… and not the festival. To celebrate the TV show’s milestone birthday, Austin PBS is digitizing all of its 50 seasons and hundreds of thousands of photos from it and other PBS programs.

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Director of Archives for Austin PBS Liz Antaramian gave KXAN a behind-the-scenes look at Austin City Limits’ archives, and she explained how they’re accomplishing the preservation project.

Austin City Limits started in October 1974, with Willie Nelson marking the first performance on a show that would go on to make history for the next 50 years and counting. That recording, along with hundreds of others, will be uploaded in its original quality and made available later for remastering and redistribution, according to a release about the project.

History being preserved

It’s not just tape recordings and photographs being preserved in the process, either. There are 50 years of show memorabilia to account for, encompassing materials ranging from fan mail to staff badges, hand-drawn images of the featured artists and more. Antaramian said the dream is to eventually open Austin PBS’s doors to have researchers come in and get hands-on experience studying the materials.

A tour of the small archives room in the Austin PBS building revealed dozens of boxes, external hard drives, binders of photos, an “Austin City Limits” neon sign, custom cowboy boots formerly worn by a long-time security officer for the show, and the original beer table where guests could pick up free beer at the show’s tapings back in the day. There’s also a shelf of quad tape cases, one of them housing a copy of the very first episode featuring the Red Headed Stranger.

The show records music history throughout the decades, but it also second-handedly earmarks Austin history over the show’s lifespan.

Since 1974, Austin has grown exponentially. At the time of the first taping of Austin City Limits, the city had a population of just less than 300,000, city records show, and now 50 years later, there are just under a million Austinites.

The show’s backdrop depicts Austin’s ever-changing skyline, showing the city’s growth throughout the years as more and more buildings are added. Many of the panels from the backdrops were auctioned off back in 2021 when Austin PBS relocated from the University of Texas’ campus to Austin Community College’s Highland campus.

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Antaramian, a formally trained archivist, said they’re “making sure that we are not just preserving our past, but we’re preserving it for the future.”

How it works

The project is possible in part thanks to a partnership between Austin PBS and Google Fiber — the latter offering a 20-gig internet service to help upload and store footage from PBS onto a cloud. The TV station said the project would have taken years to complete if it weren’t for the higher internet speeds.

“It’s a great partnership for us, because being in the world of archiving and digitization, we need a lot of power to be able to hold these materials both electronically, but we also need that speed,” Antaramian said. “And, you know, it’s great for us in terms of not just our past, but our present, which we’re living in, but also our future.”

Google Fiber’s Head of Product Nick Saporito said the company has been working with institutional clients over the last year or so to provide the 20-gig service at no cost to them. He said it’s part of a pilot program, which benefits the institutions and Google because it allows the internet provider to test its services and “understand and uncover use cases for speeds like 20 gigs.”

Google Fiber is also offering the service to the University of Missouri at Kansas City’s school of technology and engineering. Saporito said the school has been using the service for a variety of things like climate change research, and AR and VR research.

“We certainly have our ideas of what customers can do with 20-gig, but seeing it in the real world, and like really stressing it with — with use cases, like what PBS Austin has, really is quite valuable for us,” Saporito explained.

Antaramian said vendor Preserve South has been handling the actual digitization part of the project, doing the work of transforming analog into digital — and digital into other forms of digital — so that it’s all in one place. The vendor recently started working on the process of having film reels, or two-inch quad tapes, of Austin City Limits digitized. After that, Antaramian explained, the tapes are sent to salt mines in Kansas where they’re physically preserved.

Antaramian said Austin PBS has some collaborations coming up to help them celebrate the show’s 50th anniversary and recommends that people follow its social media accounts to stay up to date on celebration events.

KXAN Photojournalist Ed Zavala contributed to this story.

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