“We want people to make full use of this content, whether they cut and paste it or whether they share it, and we completely accept that we’ve got a bit of a contradiction at the moment by saying UK-only and yet encouraging people to put it on their sites to share it with others, because you can’t expect people to have geo-IP restriction technology,” admits Mr Gerhardt. “We’re thinking hard about how to deal with this after the pilot – at the moment it’s quite likely that we’re probably going to need to find a distribution partner outside of the UK.”

“We will make all our archive available, under different terms, over the next five to ten years, at a pace to be determined. There would be three modes in which people access it – some of the content would only be available commercially, for the first five year or so after broadcast, say. The second route is through a ‘view again’ strategy where you can view the programmes, but they’d be DRM-restricted. And the third mode is Creative Archive. Over time, programmes would move from one mode to another, with some programmes going straight to the Creative Archive after broadcast.”

Technorati Tags: BBC, Television Archives

“On Saturday Brazil’s government announced that Radiobrás, its official news agency, would make its archives and all its future reporting available under a Creative Commons license. The site housing the collection, which includes 150,000 photographs, was designed with free open-source software.”

From the IHT:

One of the world’s leaders in digital audio and video has opened up its vault to the public, putting thousands of hours of radio and television recordings on the Internet for free.

Historic footage of Charles de Gaulle, Marc Chagall, Edith Piaf and Bob Marley, for instance, are available in small excerpts at www.ina.fr in a variety of formats, for both high-speed and low-speed Internet connections…

About 80 percent of the collection is free. For copyrighted material, INA charges €1 to €3, or $1.29 to $3.86, for the purchase of a 48-hour viewing window or €1 to €12 for full downloads.

The IHT notes that the site is receiving about five million visits a day, and the INA is adding about 5,000 hours of footage per year to the public collection.

Technorati Tags: Television Archives

The entire NHK archive of more than 550,000 television programs should be made available on the Internet, an advisory panel for Internal Affairs and Communications Minister Heizo Takenaka agreed last week, prior to a final report to be announced later this month.

To achieve this goal, the ministry should lift the ceiling currently imposed on NHK, limiting income from Internet distribution to 1 billion yen a year, the panel said.

The panel also agreed the Broadcast Law should be revised to permit NHK to charge a viewing fee for the programs in addition to the standing viewing fee, sources close to the panel said.

Of the 550,000-plus programs owned by NHK, only about 5,700 are currently available on the Internet or to visitors to the NHK Archives in Kawaguchi, Saitama Prefecture, because of the regulation.

More at http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/business/20060507TDY02007.htm

Cory Doctorow:

The BBC has posted an online interface into catalog of 946,614 BBC radio & TV programmes, dating back 75 years — searchable by category, cast and crew. This is a treasure-trove of data.

Link to catalog, Link to Tom Loosemore’s commentary

(via Ben Hammersley)

These images of the future provide a fantastic view into the hopes, fears, and expectations of the 1960s. The collections illustrate (again) the importance of amateurs and fan communities to moving image archiving. Looking at these collections, it seems rather remarkable that it is typically so hard for fan communities to earn the trust and cooperation of program owners.

Haven’t had time to watch much yet, but their approach to orphan works really caught my eye: “If it’s out of print, we feel it’s fair game. If it’s in print, we won’t touch it.”

The footage is the only remaining footage from stations in Virginia from the 50s and 60s. Thankfully, we do have some great footage from the earliest days of television in Virginia. At the moment we are just beginning this effort and have been trying to make this archival footage accessible to scholars and teachers.

There are lessons in this footage that should never be forgotten, and with Eyes on the Prize unavailable, it’s great to see it made so easily available. It’s also a fine example of the kind of history instruction that might be done if more news footage were easily available.