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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.
Presumably, they plan to digitize it and store it in various places. But, once it's digitized, they can migrate it towards new storage devices relatively easily as well as monitor the integrity of the entire catalog and repair the broken files as need be.
As long as they migrate the content to newer technology regularly, it shouldn't be much of an issue.
The really hard bit is going to be the initial scan and import of the materials and doing so in a way that they get all the possible data off the current copies.
Nothing to do with not liking Benny Hill.
It's to do with the generation that did nearly being dead.
If you were 20 when Benny was on TV, you'll be over 60 now.
Welcome to Britain, where our comedy is up to date, the US find it 20 years later where they think it's still funny for 20 years after that.
Seriously, guys, we had Red Dwarf in the 80's/90's and the first mention I've ever seen in the US (apart from the atrocious Americanised US pilot) was in Big Bang Theory only a handful of years ago. Red Dwarf has been dead and buried since I was in secondary school.
Same with your Monty Python fetish. It was funny AT THE TIME for being outlandish, outrageous, different. That was in the 70's, ffs. It's old hat and hasn't actually been freshly funny for my entire life, yet if a Brit talks to a US person about comedy, I guarantee you they will come up (I'm a Brit, I have proven this statistically by my various encounters...)
It's not that "it's not funny", it's that it was funny BEFORE WE WERE BORN, or so long ago that nobody remembers. Since then, so much else has come and gone that's so much funnier, that by comparison it's archaic.
But you guys never seem to see that stuff.
Re-runs are the death of comedy like that, which was based on shock, rudeness, at-the-time-bordering-on-the-inappropriate, and stars that were still alive. Benny Hill has been dead for 20-something years and hasn't been on TV for over 30-something years, and that was in his later years when he just wasn't funny any more.
Hell, he starred in the ORIGINAL Italian Job and that was made in 1969.
It's like all of us here in Britain crowing about how funny I Love Lucy "is".
Congratulations! You just disproved the theory that Americans (and especially us Texans) are the most arrogant people on Earth!
Talk about misinformed. We didn't "find it 20 years later". I'm 50. I watched Benny Hill and Monty Python with my folks in the 70s. I watched Red Dwarf in the 80s and 90s on PBS here in Houston. On November 8 I bought Red Dwarf series XI on blu-ray, less than two weeks after it finished airing in the UK.
Monty Python: Introduction to North America
In the summer of 1974, Ron Devillier, the programme director for nonprofit PBS television station KERA in Dallas, Texas, started airing episodes of Monty Python's Flying Circus. Ratings shot through the roof, providing an encouraging sign to the other 100 PBS stations that had signed up to begin airing the show in October 1974—exactly five years after their BBC debut.