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Monday, 25 August 2003

BBC opens archives

Greg Dyke is going to put the BBC archives online
15 years ago, I joined the BBC as a video engineer with Television Film Services, an odd department that had dominion over (among other odd sites) Ealing Studios and the film & video archive at Windmill Road.
I spent a couple of weeks at Windmill Road, working on the 2-inch Videotape machines which you could edit videotape like film on - a razorblade to cut the tape and splice with sticky tape. You needed to cut at a frame boundary, which you found by looking for the sync pulses on the tape by holding a plastic box full of iron filings over the tape, making the tracks visible.
I walked through the archives, seeing rack after rack of old editions of Nationwide, film canisters of a forgotten adaptation of Waugh's Sword of Honour trilogy, and many more fascinating looking can's and tapes.
At the time the BBC did not have a rolling re-copying program, and many programs on tape were lost to oxide decay, not recorded at all, or had the tapes re-used. Some missing Dr Who and Top of the Pops and Dad's Armyhave been recovered, and Rosie's cousin Rob Greenwood spent a great deal of time restoring video for Dr Who and other programs at BBC Enterprises in the 90s, in many cases from 'illicit' off-air recordings by hobbyists.

I hope the BBC can cut through the tangle of copyright restrictions on music in the programs and performance fees for all the old programs; if not the release may be very spotty.

The issue of non-commercial re-use only is also tricky; when purchasing archive footage from the BBC for MMC museum and CD-ROM projects, we often got a tape full of useful material, only to be told that rights on the bits we wanted were unknown or unavailable, and we had to re-edit.

I've heard odd tales about BBC trying to constrain rights geographically before - when they launched the BBC Choice satellite channel, they webcast it for a bit, but tried to only allow UK people to see it, which is a nonsense on the internet.

Danny has more discusion
Posted by Kevin Marks at 09:06

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About Me

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Kevin Marks
Kevin Marks works on IndieWeb and open web tech. From 2011 to 2013 he was VP of Open Cloud Standards at Salesforce. From 2009 to 2010 he was VP of Web Services at BT. From 2007 to 2009, he worked at Google on OpenSocial. From 2003 to 2007 he was Principal Engineer at Technorati responsible for the spiders that make sense of the web and track millions of blogs daily. He has been inventing and innovating for over 25 years in emerging technologies where people, media and computers meet. Before joining Technorati, Kevin spent 5 years in the QuickTime Engineering team at Apple, building video capture and live streaming into OS X. He was a founder of The Multimedia Corporation in the UK, where he served as Production Manager and Executive Producer, shipping million-selling products and winning International awards. He has a Masters degree in Physics from Cambridge University and is a BBC-qualified Video Engineer. One of the driving forces behind microformats.org, he regularly speaks at conferences and symposia on emergent net technologies and their cultural impact.
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