All the post-production work for The Challenge is gone (TechRadar). Nobody outside the production knows what actually happened. The result is the same either way: hundreds of days of work lost and a premiere pushed far back. I feel for the team who now have to start over.

I started in this industry on MTV’s The Real World, the show The Challenge originally grew out of. In the nineties, moving a file between two computers could take hours. Doing things right took a long time, but so did doing things wrong. That is no longer true. The tools have been replaced many times since then. The structures around them have barely been touched.

That should make more people choke on their morning coffee. The material sits with whoever happens to be working on it. Every partner has its own server, its own routines and its own idea of what counts as a backup. A channel pays for a season but cannot see for itself whether a copy exists, or who is able to delete it.

The same goes for almost every major brand. Campaign masters, working files and language versions are scattered across the agency, the production company, the post house and the local agency in each market. Ask a marketing director where last year’s most important film assets are and who can delete them. Few can answer.