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British Film Institute To Digitize 100,000 Old TV Shows Before They Disappear (bbc.com) 124

Posted by BeauHD from the quick-before-it's-too-late dept.
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.
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British Film Institute To Digitize 100,000 Old TV Shows Before They Disappear More

British Film Institute To Digitize 100,000 Old TV Shows Before They Disappear

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  • I'm not sure I can think of a digital storage medium that has been proven to last 200 years.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      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 cop

      • Re:Tricky... (Score:5, Funny)

        by ArtemaOne ( 1300025 ) on Wednesday November 30, 2016 @10:14PM (#53398941)
        Don't worry. They'll just store it all in "the cloud" and it'll last forever.
      • As the collection gets bigger they will be under financial pressure to delay the updating as long as possible. Eventually that will lead to unrecoverable bit rot and stuff will be lost. We need to spend the money and make a good long term archive medium.

        • But that's not really how this works. You just pay for a service like Amazon Glacier, and it's a constant renewal fee.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by dhaen ( 892570 )
        It will be digitised and then stored on 2 different tape formats - currently IBM TS1150 and LTO-6 in Spectralogic tape libraries. There are systems for regular data integrity checks and a migration path.
      • 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 bei

    • I'm not sure I can think of a digital storage medium that has been proven to last 200 years.

      Gold punchcards

      No, I'm not joking

    • "I'm not sure I can think of a digital storage medium that has been proven to last 200 years."

      Nor can I - and I do backups + long term archiving as part of my dayjob (*)

      However I CAN point out that having it in a readable digital format means you can migrate to newer generations of storage _as long as you do so before the older format readers die_

      (Practically, at the moment this means migrating from LTOn to LTOn+2 when you acquire the LTOn+2 equipment and verifying the SHA256 checksums haven't changed)

      (*) L

  • "Material from the 70's ..." "five year shelf life". So it's already gone but needs $14.3 million to preserve it.

    "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

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AHuxley ( 892839 )
      Read the diversity related parts of the pdf.
      "to set agendas", "dual identities", "representation of women" ...
      For both future funding and past works.

    • Re:Sometimes a duck is just a duck ... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by dbIII ( 701233 ) on Wednesday November 30, 2016 @09:25PM (#53398623)

      Yes, some things are historically significant and should be preserved, but early forms of "breakfast TV" shouldn't be on that list.

      Episodes of Dr Who and The Goodies are gone because they were not on that sort of list. Significant or not a non-trivial number of people would have wanted to see them and even shell out cash to do so. As an example, a restored version with animation of Dr Who "Power of the Daleks" was recently in cinemas.

      Choosing a narrow list has already lost us some interesting material so it's probably a good idea not to tightly restrict this time either. There will be gems among all the muck.

  • Anarchic children's show Tiswas... (Score:4, Informative)

    by JustNiz ( 692889 ) on Wednesday November 30, 2016 @08:56PM (#53398459)

    The whole point behind Tiswas was that it actually wasn't a kids show.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by hoofie ( 201045 )
      It certainly wasn't patronising like the BBC offering

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by K8Fan ( 37875 )
      I just need to see an excellent quality version of Sally James' interview of Kate Bush.
    • I wonder if the tape archive goes back to the original regional shows. I remember watching the first episode with John Asher and Chris Tarrant, and from memory it was ATV only, rather than national. My brother entered a competition, and won a Bee Gees album. It would be worth the look on his face to be able to see that again.

  • 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.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by AHuxley ( 892839 )
      In the past a human might have to walk into a vault. Find film or a tape. Find the expert help with the playback system. Work to ensure playback would not further risk the media.
      A few very different video systems got used by different nations over the decades.
      A "robot" would be a digital system that just ensures the storage media is ready, indexed, seachable given the amount of digital material thats ready to access.
      No more walking into a vault with a shelf number, location and finding a rare video for

    • Re:Robot? (Score:4, Informative)

      by dbIII ( 701233 ) on Wednesday November 30, 2016 @09:32PM (#53398665)

      Is she perhaps talking about a device that can access stored digital tape media with a mechanical arm or something

      Yes. People call LTO6 tape autoloaders with a storage library "robots".

      Going back to old TV, the opening sequence of each episode of the show "The Prisoner" depicts the idea of that sort of "robot" being used for paper card storage instead of a few dozen tapes.

  • 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.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Kjella ( 173770 )

      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.

      I believe that was mostly older material from the 60s where the original source was intentionally purged and reused. In this case it seems the issue is the original material exists but won't live forever.

  • Last I heard Benny was to un PC for the English.

    Even the torrents were week. Haven't looked lately...

    • Last I heard Benny was to un PC for the English.

      Not a bit. Benny H never made fun of wogs, so you would probably call him PC.

      Even the torrents were week. Haven't looked lately...

      Fat lot you know, you cunt. All of the Benny Hill shows have been torrented. And it's "weak".

      • apart from the sexy dancers and sexual innuendo being probably too un-pc for current sheltered tastes I do remember one particular sketch where Benny was playing a talk show host interviewing himself as a Black African bishop who had African speech patterns and spoke in patois.

        Then they started inverting the color and the talk show host started speaking in patois and the Bishop started speaking the Queen's english. Benny also wore blackface from time to time, but I don't think that was nearly as incendiary

        • apart from the sexy dancers and sexual innuendo being probably too un-pc for current sheltered tastes

          Have you watched TV lately? Do you really believe sexy dancers and innuendo are not part of regular TV fare?

          There are things that make you laugh that you can still regret laughing at...but that is where comedy can also educate and expose the unpleasant corners of a society

          Exactly.

        • Even though it made me cringe a bit at the time it was still pretty funny. There are things that make you laugh that you can still regret laughing at...but that is where comedy can also educate and expose the unpleasant corners of a society

          To misquote ... someone, "Offence is in the eye of the beholder. (Substitute appropriate sense organ for the differently-abled."

          Personally, I'm still giggling over last night's James Bond spoof where the MegaSuper Agent is dispatched with all the weapons from Q-departmen

  • 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 h

    • The use of the word "racist" has been sadly watered down to the point it has become essentially meaningless.

             

    • Hah, Trevor McDonut. Classic. Not forgetting Algernon Winston Razzamatazz and his bread and condensed milk sandwiches. Also, the appearance of Sylvester McCoy, future unpopular Dr. Who and Radagast.

  • I don't know what the future would be like without him

  • Not Enough (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward

    100,000? That'll cover, what, 5% of Dr. Who episodes?

  • Way back when ESPN was first starting out (Score:3)

    by Solandri ( 704621 ) on Wednesday November 30, 2016 @09:29PM (#53398645)
    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 [youtube.com], 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 [youtu.be]).

    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.
    • I wonder why the TV networks bother to save things at all.

      I'm pretty sure that your government and mine, theirs and his, all save every bit of data that passes over the airwaves or T'Internets these days.

    • Sports networks have limited time rights to game footage. The long term rights are with the leagues (like NFL Films).

  • 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.

  • 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.

    • 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.

      I think the CBC or CTV rebroadcast that back in the 1980s after midnight.

      Not sure which.

  • There's another BasilBrush (Score:4, Funny)

    by tepples ( 727027 ) <.tepples. .at. .gmail.com.> on Wednesday November 30, 2016 @11:33PM (#53399299) Homepage Journal

    The Basil Brush Show

    Is that with or without the running defense of iOS [slashdot.org]?

    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?

  • 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.

  • "easy" way to preserve (Score:5, Insightful)

    by openright ( 968536 ) on Thursday December 01, 2016 @03:09AM (#53399933) Homepage

    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.

    • If there were a reasonable limit on copyright duration, then preservation occurs naturally by the public.

      No it doesn't.

      Preservation demands money and expertise that can be hard to find.

      You have a spool of tape, but do you have a compatible recorder for playback? If the signal is degraded can you recover it? That's often not a trivial problem even for the mathematician and electrical engineer. Now and again a successful solution might win you an award.

      The Disney archives remain essentially intact because they remain commercially viable and the studio has always been alert to the potential of new media.

  • 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

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