[Swprograms] BBC sees possibilities with online archive

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BBC sees possibilities with online archive

Researchers at the BBC have been studying how to put the Corporation's 
archive online after chairman Michael Grade labelled it public
property and 
said that it should, as far as possible, be made freely available. 



There are formidable obstacles to placing the entire archive online,
which 
amounts to a national memory bank involving copyright, repeat fees and 
partnership deals. But engineers now know what would be required to do so.



Staff at the BBC's research and development lab near Gatwick airport 
estimate that the entire archive could be stored at production quality
on 
hard-disk arrays occupying an area equivalent to between five and
eight floors 
of London's Canary Wharf. 



But the number of disks required should plummet in the future with
data 
densities expected to increase in line with Moore's Law on processor
speeds. 




In the first instance, at least, the archive would be very useful for 
internal use. The fact that it could be available for streaming is
already 
focusing minds on how much publicly-owned content should be freely
available 
for non-commercial use.



The BBC is doing some other navel gazing as its Charter comes up for
review, 
and radical ideas are being thrown about.



It is developing an open source video codec, called Dirac, to replace
the 
Real Networks software currently used to stream video from the BBC
site. This 
could challenge other commercial formats, including Microsoft's
Windows Media 
Player 9.



BBC researchers are also grappling with other implications of the 
convergence of computing with consumer electronics, including the
possibility 
that easy TV recording on cheap portable devices could see consumers
start to 
view programmes in chunks, rather like reading a book.

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