The Greek Film Archive's laboratories house around 3,000 items from the Telecommunications Museum's collection of audiovisual material.

These are mainly slides, and also include 16 and 35 mm films, as well as magnetic tapes. The material has been preserved and stored in special conditions, and digitisation is almost complete.

The slides, which date from the early 1950s to the mid-1990s, show OTE staff at work, the Agency's premises and various snapshots of its events. Most of the films deal with telecommunications issues, and a significant number of them are OTE productions. The films include documentaries, television series and interviews. The tapes include audio and visual files relating to OTE, information and entertainment programmes, concerts, sporting events, etc.  

Beyond the content of the above documents, however, it is interesting to follow the technological development of the recording of moving images:

Film is a photosensitive material developed in the late 19th century, first for photography and then for making and projecting motion pictures, with the first commercial motion picture film being made in 1895 by the Lumière brothers in France.

The idea of magnetic recording began to develop at the same time as film, but the first form of magnetic sound recording was used in 1928 by Fritz Pfleumer, and in 1956 it was extended to video recording (videotape). In addition, in the 1950s and 1960s, magnetic tapes were one of the basic data storage media for mainframes.

From the 1990s onwards, magnetic tape began to be replaced by digital technology, but even today companies still use magnetic tape for data storage because of its long-term durability and high capacity.

The preservation of the Museum's collection of films and tapes by the Greek Film Archive is not only for reasons of preserving the technological heritage, but also because the successive digitizations of their content - as a result of the evolution of technology - must be carried out from the primary source, i.e. the film or tape, as this way the best possible image and sound quality is achieved.

Watch the video with snapshots from a 1964 corporate-advertising documentary produced by OTE, which has been digitized from 35mm film. The film shows OTE's infrastructure and services with footage of outside crews at work. Also described in detail are the urban telephone exchanges and the use of these technologies for the benefit of the citizen, the role of OTE's telephone operators, wireless communication, telegraphy, the use of teletypes, etc. It also presents a series of graphs showing the growth of each measurable variable relating to the evolution of the organisation since its creation.