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NHK Plans 50-Year Digital Archive
"Programs from the archive will be accessible via personal computers in NHK's Tokyo broadcasting center, which will be linked to the archive via fiber optic lines. An NHK official also said that the company plans to make the archive accessible to outside users some time in the future. So, anyone have a list of good old-school anime this archive will contain?"
This is truly an ambitious project -- I wonder how many terabytes it will take to digitize that many years worth of film and TV. On the other hand, it seems to be inevitable, so it's only sensible to start now -- storage techniques and prices are sure to improve over the course of the project. I just hope they make the films available under reasonable terms. Note, this article was first posted to tetsujin.org, which is worth checking out for you Japanophiles.
I wonder what the rates will be to access the information in the library? Does this remind anyone else of Stephenson's Snow Crash, when everything the gargoyles (people who document their surrounding digitally) record is uploaded to the Library of Congress, and the gargoyles receive royalties contingent on the material's popularity? Between this and the newly announced implantable GPS system, the future is looking even more science fiction-y...
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I'm not entirely sure how this would work, but I can't help but think that television stations shouldn't have full rights to all of their content. In order to be able to offer public access to any of its content at any time, one would think the station would have to do quite a bit of renegotiation with the owners of said content. Normally, money exchanges hands each time something is broadcast, but this idea wouldn't work quite the same way with digital content. Does anyone have any more details or speculation on how this might be accomplished?
Wait! Before I get moderated down, think: How many times have you wished you had taped something because a few years later, you finally realized it was insanely funny/cool/etc. OR think about the other possibilities: no need for TIVO/Replay because you can get all the previously broadcast videos on your computer from the archive site? Granted, this will take alot of bandwidth, but isn't this what the Internet2 is supposed to be experimenting with: real-time or high-bandwidth applications with next-generation fibre backbones and faster routing architectures? (Wow, that was a lot of buzzwords)
Anyways, I'm sure that if a service like this was set up, and advertized well, by any of the major networks today (maybe not CBS... j/k) they could create a large profit stream from all the people willing to put up with banner ads, or perhaps even short commercials at the beginning or end of downloaded archive video.
Anyways, I really don't see why any of the media giants hasn't created somthing like this yet.
BTW: If someone patents this in the US, consider this prior art.
Decay of digital media can of course be overcome by simply making a new copy, but you have to be careful. Failure of digital media is usually a catastrophic failure; i.e., you lose everything all at once. With film, if it fades, you still get an image, just a faded one. With digital media, it's all or nothing. One day, poof! The disk is unreadable. You have to make sure and create a new copy often enough so that there is no danger of that happening.
The thing is, film can be an archival-quality medium. With things like dye-transfer prints and silver-based separations, the image can last a long time with no degradation -- thousands of years in theory. Too bad major movie studios don't care about that. Many films have been lost permanently due to improper storage. Ironic that they lobby Congress for more protections for their "valuable property" while said property is rotting in a vault due to negligence. Does anybody wanna bet they're going to be just as sloppy with digital media? "Oops, we waited too long between making fresh copies, and the media it was stored on has become unreadable -- it's gone forever. Oh, well."
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