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.

Comments

Re:BBC currently uses realmedia

[garcia]

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.

How far back the archives go

[Beniamino]

[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.

Re:How far back the archives go

[Wolfbone]

The BBC has never stopped radio broadcasts - if you check out this you will find several channels including an excellent serious music station (radio 3). Click on any audio stream link and you get a BBC gui wrapper for the realplayer streams with lots of links to tons of archived stuff too including the superb Reith Lectures 2003 featuring V.S. Ramachandran.

By the way, many of us Brits have pressured them to give us Ogg streams in the past and they even actually did so for a while but they have been very stuffy about I.P. issues.

Sadly they tend to commission much of the new stuff from external companies which insist on the use of Real streams to protect their I.P. So not only do we suffer this but whatever turns up in these archive releases is not likely to be added to significantly in the future.

It wouldn't surprise me if the Helix/Real stuff gets released around the time this archive comes online either. Then they'll have an excuse never to provide decent Ogg streams. I don't know about anyone else but I am not so easily fooled by a few coins thrown into the crowd by the benevolent panjandrums at the BBC. Everyone seems to think they're just going to dump the whole archive on a server and say "Help yourselves chaps and chappesses" - more likely they'll turn it into a number of managed channels. Anyway, the BBC should be making the programmes itself or using it's vast power to demand the I.P. rights of the stuff it commissions.

Hitchhiker's guide!?

[JordanH]

If this includes the original Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy Radio shows from the early 80's this would be GREAT!

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.

Re:Hitchhiker's guide!?

[gidds]

I don't believe they've ever been released exactly as originally broadcast.

[fx: glances over at CD box sets of the two series, (c) BBC Worldwide 1996]

Er... excuse me?

Well, technically, you're right; I believe that there were some very minor changes; especially to the last couple of episodes which were recorded and mixed in a terrible hurry. But they are substantially as broadcast, and certainly what the original producers intended.

And if these CDs really aren't available where you are (which I suspect they are), I expect that at least some of the MP3s out there are from them. (Not that I'm condoning that kind of thing, of course...)

Re:What and when?

[xmedar]

The government recently announced that it would have an review of the BBCs online activities, a clear retaliation over the Kelly affair.

Canadian Broadcast Corp. (CBC) archives online

[Lust]

CBC has archives back to 1938 online HERE. The radio broadcasts from the front line of WW II are really something.

Re:This would be great!

[Jon Chatow]

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.

Re:Will this actually include *entertainment*?

[TomV]

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