NHK Plans 50-Year Digital Archive

Tetsujin28 writes: "The Japan Times Online reports that NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corp.) is planning a digital video archive for all film and video footage from the company's 50 years in broadcasting. Construction of a new building to house the archive is to begin in January 2001, with completion expected in 2003."

"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.

Comments

Copyright issues?

[D_Gr8_BoB]

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?

Re:This is cool, but...

[Apotsy]

The article doesn't specify, but I would imagine that for archival quality they would be using an uncompressed format (or lossless compression). I doubt anyone who knew what they were doing would allow lossy compression for a permanent archive.

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."