AUCKLAND, 10 August 2026 – Silver Trak Digital and its specialist archive division DAMsmart NZ have completed a landmark recovery and digitisation project for World Netball, returning the complete vision record of the 2003 World Netball Championships in Kingston, Jamaica to broadcast-ready condition after the tapes were feared lost to the ravages of time.
Held at the National Indoor Stadium in Kingston from 10 to 20 July 2003, the eleventh staging of the Netball World Cup saw 24 teams play 100 matches over 11 days, culminating in New Zealand’s Silver Ferns defeating Australia 49 to 47 to claim their fourth world title. Jamaica finished third.
The entire tournament was recorded at the time on NTSC Beta SP, the broadcast standard of the era.
At the conclusion of the championship the tapes were packed into boxes and stored in a house with no air conditioning, where they sat for 22 years in a tropical climate. The result was significant mould growth and on most of the tapes, severe sticky tape syndrome, a condition in which the binder layer degrades and causes the tape to stick to itself and to the playback head.
Of the initial 49 tapes in the collection, 12 had snapped.
World Netball, the international governing body responsible for organising the Netball World Cup, had previously attempted to have the tapes digitised but with little success. With the help of a large international courier company, which transported the collection, the tapes were shipped to DAMsmart NZ, where the team had previously completed similar archive work for Netball New Zealand.
The digitisation has been funded through the Marsden Grant awarded to Professor Toni Bruce and Dr Margaret Henley of the University of Auckland, alongside Dr Bevan Erueti of Massey University, by the Royal Society Te Apārangi. The Marsden Standard Grant supports an investigation into the intergenerational, historical and cultural importance of netball in the lives of women in Aotearoa, with the upcoming centenary of organised netball in New Zealand offering a unique opportunity to critically re-examine the sport’s past and present.
DAMsmart NZ, an award-winning specialist in audiovisual digitisation, digital preservation and archive management serving institutions, broadcasters and content owners across Australia, New Zealand, Asia and the Pacific, applied its established recovery methodology to the collection.
The process required each tape to be extensively baked at a precisely controlled temperature, hot enough to kill the mould and soften the hardened glue within the binder, but not so hot as to cause further damage to the already fragile carrier.
After the initial baking process, DAMsmart’s specialist technicians took additional manual steps, applying a range of techniques to ensure the tapes could be successfully loaded and played back for digitisation. Then, during digitisation, the content was encoded into PAL.
Once complete, the resulting files were run through an automated quality control process before a human operator manually checked them again, ensuring the recovered vision met broadcast-grade standards.
The outcome has delighted World Netball, which had seriously believed the visual record of a World Championship series had been lost forever.
David Elder, General Manager of Silver Trak Digital NZ, said the result was a credit to the technical depth of the DAMsmart NZ team and its long experience with deteriorating legacy formats.
“This was a project that genuinely sat on the edge of what is recoverable,” Elder said. “Twenty-two years in a tropical environment without climate control, with mould and sticky tape syndrome across most of the collection and a dozen tapes already snapped, is about as challenging as archive work gets. DAMsmart NZ has been doing this work for many years and we have the people, the processes and the patience to bring something like this back. To hand World Netball back the complete vision record of a World Championship they thought was gone is exactly the kind of result we exist to deliver. The DAMsmart NZ team did an exceptional job and we are very proud of it.”
The recovery of the 2003 World Netball Championships represents a significant outcome for the global netball community, securing the visual history of one of the sport’s premier events and making it available for broadcast, research and historical reference. World Netball is currently seeking funding to digitise the remaining games of the competition.
Picture credits
2003 World Netball Championships tapes and footage recovered and digitised by DAMsmart NZ