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British Film Institute To Digitize 100,000 Old TV Shows Before They Disappear (bbc.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from BBC: Thousands of British TV programs are to be digitized before they are lost forever, the British Film Institute says. Anarchic children's show Tiswas and The Basil Brush Show are among the programs in line for preservation. The initiative was announced as part of the BFI's five-year strategy for 2017-2022. "Material from the 70s and early 80s is at risk," said Heather Stewart, the BFI's creative director. "It has a five or six-year shelf life and if we don't do something about it will just go, no matter how great the environment is we keep it in. "Our job is make sure that things are there in 200 years' time." The BFI has budgeted $14.3 million of Lottery funding towards its goal of making the UK's entire screen heritage digitally accessible. This includes an estimated 100,000 of the "most at-risk" British TV episodes and clips held on obsolete video formats. The list includes "early children's programming, little-seen dramas, regional programs and the beginnings of breakfast television." The issue for the BFI, Ms Stewart added, was also to do with freeing up storage space. "We have a whole vault which is wall-to-wall video. If we digitized it, it would be in a robot about the size of a wardrobe," she said.
Essential viewing during those formative years.
I'm not sure I can think of a digital storage medium that has been proven to last 200 years.
Breakfast served all day!
"the beginnings of breakfast television". Really?
If you look at the large amount of stuff that has been digitized from long ago you'll see that most of it could easily be lost with no harm to society at all. I've bought DVDs with large numbers of very old movies, and most of them are not worth the effort.
Yes, some things are historically significant and should be preserved, but early forms of "breakfast TV" shouldn't be on that list.
Although I would love to have copies of a few of the Breakfast Time shows with Tom Bergeron and Laurie whats-her-name (before she married the producer of Live with Regis...) The one with Phil Kogan on remote in the pristine Vermont woods explaining why they couldn't get a live feed from the place they wanted to be because of all the trees, and someone in the background making chainsaw noises, was absolutely priceless. But every scene with the moronic puppet going "Tom. Tom. Tom. Tom..." could be lost forever and nobody would notice. It wasn't even as funny as Sheldon going "Penny. Penny. Penny", it was just annoying.
The whole point behind Tiswas was that it actually wasn't a kids show.
Bulk digital storage requires a robot? Is she perhaps talking about a device that can access stored digital tape media with a mechanical arm or something? Or is any high tech hardware these days just called a "robot" if people don't know what else to call it?
The article didn't provide any more details, which is a shame, since that sounds sort of interesting to see.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Some of the Dr. Who were already lost, and reconstructed by fans from audio and photographs, though I believe some were found recorded in Nigeria.
Last I heard Benny was to un PC for the English.
Even the torrents were week. Haven't looked lately...
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Ah Saturday Mornings. On the BBC we had the safe, middle-class, colourful jumper version with Noel Edmonds, Keith Chegwin etc. On the the other side it was anarchy and chaos with Sally, Chris, Bod, Lenny and John. The dying fly; The Phantom Flan Flinger. Lenny Henry got his career rolling on that although I'm sure his will disavow it now. One of the best bits was when he was pretending to read the News as Trevor McDonald and the real Trevor came up behind him. Although stuck for words, his comment "Well hello daddy" was a cracker. All of this of course is completely lost on non-UK people and those below a certain age. p.s. People moan about the UK and how racist it is but if that's so how does a black journalist born in Trinidad become such a much-loved icon ?
If we had a rule that after twenty years stuff is public domain then the government authorities could put it on an archive website. This would preserve our media history, and allow poorer citizens access to media so they can become more culturally aware and educated. This would empower people to create better media of their own.
And they're going to make it all freely accessible to the public afterwards, so it can be enjoyed without limit and be archived by amateurs also as a last resort.
A-hahahah of course not. No they're just going to put it into another vault aren't they?
I don't know what the future would be like without him
... posterity.
"My poor pussy saw her robot and was running around the room al night" - Mrs Slocombe (probably)
100,000? That'll cover, what, 5% of Dr. Who episodes?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
A friend of my sister's worked there and gave us a tour when we visited. He showed us their vault room where they kept all their videotapes. It wasn't very big, so I asked him since there were so many different sporting events going on every day, how long did they save the recordings of these events. He said most of the stuff (local sports, lower-interest stuff like non-Olympics track events, etc) they only kept for a month or two. Pro sports were kept at least a year, longer for more important games. Playoff finals and particularly notable games, they'd keep indefinitely. But most of the "memorable" events could be boiled down to just a few highlight clips (e.g. a world record-breaking long jump).
A shocking amount of stuff gets erased or tossed out simply because there's no space to save it (or need at the time). If you think about everything everyone does every day, it's a mindboggling amount of material which is produced daily, So it's inevitable that a lot of it is going to be lost (hopefully with a summary or end result saved). You have to be obsessive/compulsive to want to save everything.
Historians of the future won't just be concerned about the content, but the media, the format, and how the media degades over time as well.
After all, just because we've got copies of the Magna Carta or something more mundane like a 15th-century grocery list in digital form doesn't mean we get rid of the originals.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Never heard of it until last night. Had insomnia, it's on at 2 AM. Something about a chicken egg and tricking people into thinking it was a real egg. Funny as hell.
Aired in 1954, 4 years before I was born.
Somewhere in Northern Virginia is a non-climate controlled storage area where PBS TV shows going back to the 1970's is rotting away. No money to digitize, and often no way to monetize because the original copyright holders can't be found.
just in case...
The Basil Brush Show
Is that with or without the running defense of iOS?
Boom boom.
Assuming these are half-hour episodes, that's 50,000 hours of video or 5.71 years. Digital storage is pretty cheap these days, so labor expenses should be more than storage media. How does this come to $14.3 million?
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The BFI are scanning these so they can ascertain/renew/monopolise the distribution rights. Some of the still-missing material could be very valuable due to the fact the BBC/BFI currently DON'T have access to it. This is an effort to minimise the ability of others to lay claim to similarly rare material, whilst bringing the rest up to (copy-protected) DVD-retailable quality.
You may want to read this http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/23/business/media/23steal.html "To store a digital master record of a movie costs about $12,514 a year, versus the $1,059 it costs to keep a conventional film master."
The easy way to preserve old content is to restore the public domain, and limit the current infinitely extended copyright.
Currently, most every audio and video recording ever made is copyrighted and extended every few decades to protect the interests of a few large companies.
As a side effect, preserving old media is often illegal without permission/licensing (which may be impossible), even if the media is abandoned.
If there was a reasonable limit on copyright duration, then preservation occurs naturally by the public.
In the current model, public preservation is strictly prohibited and prevented with DMCA and similar, and old media may just disappear.
Digitized Benny Hill!
Funny how old tech (book, engraved stone,...) can last for centuries whereas TV shows can disappear roughly after four decades.
Firstly, I hope they pick some easy to encode / decode format like DV with PCM audio for archival. It's not space efficient like MP4, but it's less destructive on the information being digitised. I used DV on my VHS tapes.
On another point, isn't this what people are using Youtube for, as a big archive... oh, but the users haven't paid the copyright cartel their cocaine money the film/tv/record industry shoves up it's collective nose, so the uploads get "monotonized", blocked, or entire Youtube channel gets deleted.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
You're thinking of the US cable channel fX in the 90s with Tom Bergeron and Laurie Hibbert.
Don't forget Glam Metal Detectives. Me and my dad took a trip down to London to watch that again a few years ago. There was one joke we referenced for years and we went all the way down there to see it again as you can't buy the show, it's not on youtube or any of the bigger torrent sites. We got a little room, a shitty TV, crappy headphones and the tapes. We watched it all til it came on and it was worth every second. She loved it!
What's that? We're number one in Backupland? That's good, we're playing there next week.
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should be grounds for arrest of the owner for destruction of public property: that copyright is based on the work becoming public domain, and if the owner wants to renege on the deal AFTER they've gained the benefits of it, the work belonged to the public but was destroyed.
I don't know where those figures come from but they are a pile of rubbish. The digital master of a movie could probably be held for well under a $100 a year. An LTO7 tape has a raw capacity of 6TB and costs around 120USD, keep in a cool room has a shelf life of over a decade. Consumes *ZERO* power during that time. A huge 10000 slot library so it can be recalled without human intervention will consume around 1kW of power. Though to be fair a single frame would consume pretty much the same.
Whoever came up with that $12,000 a year needs the sack for gross incompetence.
I was a VTR engineer, for several of many before my conversion to IT commodity analyst / writer, I kept old quad format VTRs in working order. The BBC of all the national broadcasting companies, was the last to migrate content to Type C 1", which almost universally replaced quad format VTRs - tanks that they were, the quad machines (4 heads on a small very high speed spinning cylinder - most of them looked like....hmmm. Google it. The BBC kept more content on Quad than any other broadcaster, one reason being that they had some of the best studio maintainers on the planet - one of my mentors was a former BBC engineer and I know for a fact that he taught some technical knowledge that is long gone now, save for his students BBC dont lose TTSS or Smiley's People or any of the Le carre materials dramatized in the 1960's.