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

What and when?

[ThufirHawat]

Before we rejoice and pop off the champagne to celebrate, allow me to pour some water on the fire:
- the article was quite vague, and it was clearly aiming to state that releasing for free material is a duty (newly discovered...) of a public broadcaster, while for other endeavours there are commercial broadcasters, who should not be charged huge licence fees (winking to them...);
- this is obviously a not particularly bright attempt by the BBC to defend a role which is no longer clear to themselves nor to the spin-based Blair dictatorship, recently torpedoed by the Kelly affair; with the review of the Royal Charter, which provides the conditions under which the BBC operates, due soon (I think in 2005, in any case before Tony the liar gets the boot); it looks like pre-emptive defensive action thus...
- as to the format in which stuff will be made available, let's see: recently BBC changed even its teletext format to prevent users who receive spill-over broadcast (like myself in Belgium) to fully access teletext information; I have my doubts on their willingness to make something available for free outside of Little England...