Monday, August 25, 2003

The 'creative' archive I'll be fascinated to hear how the BBC archive is to be opened up and made available to download online.

The format arguments and the question of what content will be made available aside, I wonder where the content going to be stored, and how the resulting bandwidth charges will be met...

The BBC's television and radio programmes span almost 100 years, across multiple channels with almost 24/7 output.

At around 10GB for one week's of Radio 1 (encoded as a 48khz wav file in mono), would amount to 1000GB for one year's worth, in stereo.

Radio 1 has been running since 1967 - 36 years.

Then there's BBC ONE and BBC TWO television, Radios 2-5 (and the new digital channels), the national and regional variations (Radio Scotland has been running for 25 years), plus the World Service - and then the BBC would have to keep up recordings/encodings with the ongoing transmissions.

Can you imagine the server backup required for something that massive?

This isn't to mention the problems such as sports rights, or actor's unions; writers like Phil Redmond effectively own the rights to programmes like Grange Hill.

The BBC have millions of hours worth of sporting events and such programmes from the last century in their archives, but it's no secret that they cannot exploit the material online because they don't own the rights to the events themselves.

They own the media - but it can only be used on television or radio - never online, unless the rights have been legally cleared and paid for.

The HangingDay Journal asks the additional question about users outside the UK accessing content in this kind of archive, when they haven't paid their licence fee - but that won't be an issue soon, especially with fixed, trackable IP addresses now being distributed by UK-based broadband providers and geographical pin-pointing technology improving all the time.

The big issues are the required infrastructure, the legal obstacles, the format wars, the storage required, the back-up required, the bandwidth charges, the maintanence, etc. etc. etc.

We might be lucky to get a very scaled-down version of this creative archive, but probably never the full thing.

I'd make an estimate at about two percent of the total archive being available within the next 10-20 years - anything else is stretching the technology a bit too far.

Found on LMG.

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