BBC Digital Archive ‘shambles’
May 3, 2013
The BBC’s new £133 million (€164m) digital video archive – which was meant to make the redeveloped New Broadcasting House tapeless – is not functioning, according to The Guardian, with tape editing machines having to be installed as a result.
The mess is completed because the BBC’s shiny new headquarters were not designed for the heat from the tape editing machines and plans are afoot to put them in a special refrigerated area.
The idea was for the BBC to do away with tapes and create an internal cloud archive that staff can access, upload, edit and then air from their computers. It has a budget equivalent to over 900,000 BBC licence fees.
The newspaper quotes a BBC insider: “Not only have there been huge problems with the software, but only a relatively small amount of the BBC’s archive has actually been digitised. The vast bulk remains on tape and film.”