public broadcasting archives - nz & uk

Lange Oxford Union Speech

Hard News have obtained and effectively released the audio of David Lange’s 1985 Oxford Union debate. This is wonderful news and obviously very timely. I am downloading it to the ‘pod’ to as I type. Nice to see that TVNZ came through for Hard News where Radio NZ failed. [1]

However, as Russell notes, we should not be pinging archivists from either organisation. The real issues are at the policy development and funding level. The BBC’s Creative Archive demonstrates this. Simply stating a policy, like Greg Dyke did almost 2 years ago, is far from enough. It requires buy in from a wide range of groups who have a stake in the matter. Then actually freeing up material requires copyright clearance, a complex and expensive activity.

“We need the intellectual buy in from all stake holders in BBC content and since there are often many rights owners, with typical BBC programmes comprising bought-in footage, commercial music, co-production partners and talent, this is a long process.” Paul Gerhardt, Project Director of the Creative Archive Licence Group explains. “In the short term the BBC will move forward by prioritising the release of content where there are fewer/simpler rights issues by releasing content from its rich natural history archives for example although we are working hard to widen this selection to other genres as soon as possible.”

The BBC Creative Archive’s first offering has just become available. A wide variety of stock footage has been placed on the Radio One site for aspiring VJ (Video Jockeys) to mix up a storm with. The clips are offering in three versions, Windows Media, QuickTime and MPEG-1. No information on what codecs were used for the Windows Media and QuickTime versions.

The bad news is that unless you, or your web proxy, are based in the UK the clips are unavailable.

“The archive content made available by members of the Creative Archive Licence Group under the terms of the Creative Archive Licence is restricted to the UK because the member organisations who supply the content are funded with public money to serve the UK population. They are therefore unable to bear the cost of distribution to overseas audiences. In addition, there may be broadcast rights restrictions which means that content intended for a UK audience should not be made available overseas.”

1. I am employed by TVNZ [2]
2. My views are my own, and do not represent TVNZ’s