BBC To Allow Public To Download Its Library

Posted by: wfaulk

BBC To Allow Public To Download Its Library - 25/08/2003 12:23

From the IMDB news stuff:
BBC Director-General Greg Dyke said Sunday that the public will soon be able to download any of the BBC's radio and TV programs from the Internet as part of a new service, the BBC Creative Archive. Speaking at the Edinburgh TV Festival, Dyke said, "Up until now this huge resource has remained locked up, inaccessible to the public because there hasn't been an effective mechanism for distribution. But the digital revolution and broadband are changing all that. For the first time there is an easy and affordable way of making this treasure trove of BBC content available to all."
Does anyone have any more information? It'd be cool to download all of Doctor Who.

Wait. There's more stuff on the BBC's web site: BBC plans to open up its archive to the public. Very cool.
Posted by: RobotCaleb

Re: BBC To Allow Public To Download Its Library - 25/08/2003 12:31

red dwarf was on bbc, correct?
Posted by: JeffS

Re: BBC To Allow Public To Download Its Library - 25/08/2003 12:33

It'd be cool to download all of Doctor Who.
That would be cool. I can just see my wife rolling her eyes now . . .
Posted by: jimhogan

Re: BBC To Allow Public To Download Its Library - 25/08/2003 12:42

: BBC plans to open up its archive to the public.

Damned Communists! Just another effort by the so-called "open source" secret 5th Internationale to undermine the free market and confuse the public about the true role of intellectual property in our lives!

Doctor Who? Doctor Who?? Just how is Lost in Space to respond to such an affront?
Posted by: andym

Re: BBC To Allow Public To Download Its Library - 25/08/2003 12:49

We employees have been able to access Information & Archives for a while now, supposedly for free. I keep meaning to get the DigiBetas for the the Mary Whitehouse Experience.
Posted by: peter

Re: BBC To Allow Public To Download Its Library - 25/08/2003 15:02

Back in the day, the rumour used to be that Napster had more Goon shows than the BBC did -- the Torvaldian distributed backup policy being better than the BBC Archive's own. It'll be interesting to see whether that's actually the case (or indeed whether Goon shows in the BBC archives now all have strange ID3 comments like "~~~ ripp3d by aUdIoMaStEr ~~~").

Peter
Posted by: g_attrill

Re: BBC To Allow Public To Download Its Library - 25/08/2003 15:21

Unfortunately, even the BBC have substantially misquoted their Director General. What he actually said was:

We intend to allow parts of our programmes, where we own the rights, to be available to anyone in the UK to download so long as they don't use them for commercial purposes.

The full text is available here

It looks like they will be making short clips available for research/educational use rather than DivXing their entire comedy/sci-fi back catalogue. Lots of people got the wrong end of the stick!

Even then, I suspect the material will only be available via the BBCi Broadband peering network, where it is a no-cost exercise with regards to bandwidth.

Gareth
Posted by: andym

Re: BBC To Allow Public To Download Its Library - 25/08/2003 15:30

In reply to:

the Torvaldian distributed backup policy being better than the BBC Archive's own



What backup policy? Even now there are loads of archive material being junked. Telly centre now only has 2 quadruplex machines left to service all the archive material still on 2 inch. We could get to a point where we have rapidly decaying material with no reliable way of retrieving it. I can see now why Granada are taking such good care of its 1 and 2 inch machines.
Posted by: Daria

Re: BBC To Allow Public To Download Its Library - 25/08/2003 19:52

What backup policy? Even now there are loads of archive material being junked.


You'd think people would learn about that. (Near the bottom of the page.)
Posted by: peter

Re: BBC To Allow Public To Download Its Library - 26/08/2003 01:33

What backup policy? Even now there are loads of archive material being junked.
Well, yes, that was sort of the point. Archival is one of the things you'd think the BBC would be good at... even though it didn't seem to originally be apparent to them, you'd think the Goon show thing would have persuaded them. They needn't even keep the original media if they can automate effective high-bitrate digitisation [1] -- but then perhaps this is what the current initiative is all about.

I don't know what the data density of 2in videotape is, but I bet that nowadays a good Sorensonning or MPEG-4ing could get three semitrailers of it onto a single winchester.

Peter

[1] And a backup strategy and a rolling programme of re-copying to newer media as old ones become obsolete.