An interesting article in the Los Angeles Times about the fragile state of an important (analogue) historical radio archive. The carefully preserved original scripts, fragile transcriptions of radio shows and news broadcasts, antique microphones and rare equipment from Southern California’s first stations have been accidentally contaminated by toxic PCBs.

The dangers may be different but the challenges involved in digital preservation are similarly about trying to predict the unexpected, calculate risk and always having a contingency plan.

The BBC Archive Trial (also sometimes called the Open Archive Project) has recently launched. The BBC will put approximately 1000 hours of selected content online as part of the full trial.

The first stage of the trial provides access to a wide range of programmes about the anniversary of independence for India and Pakistan. Many of these programmes will be of interest to our collaborators at Columbia University.

The site also contains some very interesting talking head video interviews:-

- Contributor rights - Simon Hayward-Tapp outlines why re-showing programmes is so complex.
- Why we’ve included difficult programmes - Natalie Christian explains why we have included programmes in the trial that are challenging to watch.
- The BBC television archive - Adam Lee talks about the the BBC’s changing attitude towards programme preservation.
- The BBC sound archive - Hear the “reel” story of radio with Simon Rooks

I suggest that we all at Spoken Word sign up for the trial so we are kept informed of new programmes as they go online.

ITV announced this week the imminent launch of their TV on demand service. Similar to those offered by Channel 4 and the recent trial announced by the BBC, it will offer the chance to see any ITV programme broadcast in the last 30 days direct from their website. The £20m upgrade to ITV.com will make available about 20,000 hours of popular archive footage, and stream ITV channels live.

In vein with current ITV programming on Television, the material will be free and feature advert breaks or be supported by a sponsor. Streaming will be direct from the website and will not require additional software, unlike the BBC’s iPlayer that will only run on Windows PC’s initially.

A recent study by Motorola showed that 45% of broadband users in Europe watched TV shows online. France topped the stats with 59%, whilst Britain had only 43%. The new services from the BBC and ITV should help boost these figures, whilst alternatives such as Joost, from the makers of Skype, are breeding choice in the web-TV market with some less mainstream content.