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BBC to Put Entire Radio & TV Archive Online
An anonymous reader writes "The BBC is to to put it's entire radio and television archive online, free for everyone, as the BBC Creative Archive." The article is a little thin on how far back these archives go, but regardless, this is a gigantic amount of data, and to see it go online, and open to the public is very cool.
considering that he mentions that because of the availability of broadband as being one of the methods that allows this to happen, I doubt that they will continue to cater to the 56k realmedia format.
Benny Hill wasn't a BBC show. It was shown on ITV and made by the (now defunct) Thames Television (my father was a cameraman on it for a while).
MPAA == Motion Picture Ass. (pun intended) of America
BBC == British Broadcasting Corporation
Britian != America
Conclusion: MPAA can go fist themselves.
[History of the BBC]
The BBC was founded in 1922. They broadcast radio only until 1936 when they started their first TV channel. A lot of cool stuff.
Everybody I know who heard those broadcasts agrees that it was the best HHGTG of all. I don't believe they've ever been released exactly as originally broadcast. Transcripts are available of those shows, but these miss the subtle music and audio effects that made the show really wonderful. I know I was disappointed with some audio tapes I purchased years later.
I've never been interested in ripping off Douglas Adams, or his family, by downloading mp3s that purport to be copies of the original show.
Even if you managed to find the mysterious 2nd step, the BBC is a non-profit organisation, which is exactly why it can do something like this.
Yeah this is true, but at least programs do not have breaks in the middle. Films are ruined by ad breaks, and boy is the Simpsons better without 10 minutes of car-ads interspersed.
Also while it's true they advertise their own products, I would be rather miffed if they didn't advertise their own programs as I'd never find out about anything. Anyway they've just demonstrated that they are more concerned with people enjoying their content than making money so I forgive them advertising their paid for content, they obviously need some extra income.
Advertising the digital content is annoying, but bear in mind analog TV will cease completely in a few years. I wouldn't be surprised if the Government is forcing the beeb to advertise digital TV to encourage adoption. If not they still need to encourage adoption, so I forgive them again.
Hmmm.. can the beeb do anything wrong in my eyes? Perhaps not.
The BBC is funded by a single licence fee per household, not by the number of TVs. You only need pay it in the UK if you use a TV to view television material (I believe console use is excluded, but significantly also if you view such material on the internet, so if you watch it, the licence fee will still be legally required, even if you don't have a TV.
Even non-profit organizations need to have annual revenues (donations, etc) >= costs or else they wouldn't very long
Obviously you're not a Brit. The BBC's revenue comes from the television license fee, a standard part of the landscape in the UK.
The government recently announced that it would have an review of the BBCs online activities, a clear retaliation over the Kelly affair.
Any sufficiently advanced man is indistinguishable from God
will it really include every episode of Doctor Who
They don't actually have every episode of a lot of older stuff. They decided a while back that the archives had no value and started destroying it. This is a real pain for collectors like me, but something we have to work with. Still, I'm hoping that thay will be able to flesh out my collection some(as i'm broke).
On Arrakis: early worm gets the bird. Magister mundi sum!
Here in Canada the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) offers some of it's shows (Quirks and Quarks) in .ogg format. And at least their radio messages have no commercials! (net even "sponsorship acknowledgements.")
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but this may not be the entire archive but only parts of certain TV and radio broadcasts mainly for educational purposes. Quoting the speech given my Greg Dyke:
"We intend to allow parts of our programmes, where we own the rights, to be available to anyone in the UK to download so long as they don't use them for commercial purposes."
Read the entire speech: here.
CBC has archives back to 1938 online HERE. The radio broadcasts from the front line of WW II are really something.
This is a diagram showing the BBC's overall network architecture.
This is a set of graphs of their current RealMedia throughput usage.
This is a set of graphs of their current overall Internet throughput.
James F.
They decided a while back that the archives had no value and started destroying it
It's more accurate to say that in the 1970's, in a nasty funding squeeze and an incipient recession, and with no market yet existing for repeats, no domestic videotape yet, only three domestic TV channels, the BBC couldn't afford enough videotape to keep operating and to continue operating except by recycling the tapes they already had. And with Colour being new and wonderful, the archives of old B&W stuff that they wouldn't ever use again, I mean who would watch it anyway, was a good place to start the recycling.
There's a lot of stuff come back from overseas broadcasters, but there are still several complete episodes missing, such as Tenth Planet ep4, all but eps 5 and 10 of The Daleks' Masterplan, and complete stories including Power Of The Daleks, Evil Of The Daleks, Marco Polo, Galaxy 4, Fury From the Deep, The Highlanders.
TomV
IANAL .They can be sued in the US , however they must be showed to be "doing business in the US" . Past legal precedent shows that meerly offering something for free download to people in the US does not establish you as doing business in the US .
there a goverment agency . If they are to be sued they must be sued under british law
On a side note british law (along with canadian law) imposes a mutch shorter period in witch a public agency must be challanged than that of an individual (its a couple of months in some situations) .
David Kelly was a UK Government scientist. He leaked information to the BBC to the effect that the Government has embelished a report originally from the intelligence services so as to overstate the threat from Saddam Hussein and thus to gain support for war. The scientist's name got out, apparently deliberately leaked by the Government, he became the focus of a lot of questions, and he killed himself.
These events are currently the subject of a judicial enquiry.
The Government and the BBC both have a lot at stake in defending their integrity. Was the BBC's reporting accurate? Did they place too much reliance on a single source of evidence? Could they have done more to conceal their source of evidence? Did the Government deliberately deceive parliament / the public / each other in order to go to war? (separate question from whether the war was a good idea, though positions on the two tend to run together) and so on.
In general the public has more faith in the BBC than in the Government and any very obvious move to retaliate is likely to hurt the Government. I suspect they have a lot of room for more subtle attacks though.
Just to slightly correct you here, he "allegedly" killed himself, his death is at the very least suspicious in that he was found with a bottle of painkillers that are easily overdosed on, causing respitory arrest and his wrist was slashed as well. It maybe that he did kill himself, though that is not proven, and before the war Dr. Kelly said he would be found dead in the woods if Iraq was invaded. The documents released so far in the Hutton enquiry can be found here and include such interesting information as the government attempting to ensure that Dr. Kelly was not questioned about the status of Iraqs WMD programmes in his testimony before Parliamentry commitees, as his informed opinion contradicted the government line that Iraq was a "current and ongoing threat" as the PM stated and as the PMs chief of staff said he might say some uncomfortable things.
Any sufficiently advanced man is indistinguishable from God
The BBC at its finest.