Television Archiving

Viacom Puts the Daily Show Archive Online - /.

• October 19th, 2007

Viacom Puts the Daily Show Archive Online:

tburton writes “Viacom has put the entire eight year run of the Daily Show with John Stewart online. The content is available from the official Daily Show site, and features clip rating, tags, and numerous community features. The whole thing is support by relatively unobtrusive contextual ads. ‘Viacom’s decision to post its entire archive–while fighting YouTube in the courts–sets the scene for a battle between the established media players and their high profile entertainment brands against the user generated content sites, most notable YouTube. Also watching closely the Viacom experiment will be the telco IPTV industry which has seen the market place change rapidly as the quality of online video continues to improve, with at least one platform/site, Vimeo, already offering 1280X720 HD quality direct from the browser.’”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Documentary videos on OA

• September 26th, 2007

Good news for Intelligent Television:

A collection of documentary videos on OA is a giant step closer to a screen near you, thanks to a grant from the Open Society Institute.  See the September 17 announcement from Intelligent Television and BioMed Central:

The Open Society Institute has awarded a grant to support the production and distribution of the Open Access Documentary Project, a collection of online videos celebrating the benefits of open access to scientific and medical research.  Intelligent Television and BioMed Central are co-producers of the Project. 

The Open Access Documentary Project will facilitate the ongoing work of BioMed Central and Intelligent Television in promoting open access to science and medicine in fields as diverse as malaria research and particle physics. 

The producers are now assembling an international editorial board and contacting institutions that hold archival and production resources that will be vital to the project.  Principal production has begun in London, New York, and at CERN in Geneva, featuring video interviews with publishers and consumers of scientific and medical information in the developed and developing world —and with other stakeholders in open access including foundations, government agencies, and the media….

(via Open Access News)

links for 2007-08-16

• August 16th, 2007

• Library of Congress redeploys ex-Federal Reserve bank vault as a high-capacity digital archive
  (tags: LC archives)
• Dan Cohen’s Digital Humanities Blog » Google Books: Champagne or Sour Grapes?
  (tags: google)
• YouTube Downloads: vConvert.net
• DRM Dumpster automates the DRM stripping process - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)
  (tags: drm tools)
• archivists : Message: Scribe/BookDrive scanning station : buy or build
  (tags: books scanning google scribe IA)

RFP for the American Archive

• August 9th, 2007

This is now on the fast track:

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (”CPB”) is hereby announcing a Request for Proposals (”RFP”) to secure an entity or individual to manage the American Archive 1.0 initiative in accordance with the information and guidelines published below.

American Archive 1.0 will serve the American public by preserving, exhibiting, and sharing the enduring programming produced and distributed by the public broadcasting system. The Archive will make use of emerging technologies to allow access to this content by educational and cultural institutions, public broadcasting stations, and the general
public.

CPB seeks an Initiative Manager to consult with key stakeholders within the public broadcasting system to determine and build consensus for the overall purpose of American Archive 1.0. Tactically, the Initiative Manager will consult with experts within and without the public broadcasting system to develop a blueprint for the implementation of American Archive 1.0.

The big challenge (and expense) will be (re)clearing the materials that have been produced, often at public expense, over the last five decades.

From JTS 2007

• June 28th, 2007

Am at the JTS 20007 conference in Toronto, listening to an amazing presentation by Giovanna Fossati, Curator of the Nederlands Filmmuseum about Images for the Future, a $233mm, seven year project to preserve, digitize, and make accessible more than 285,000 hours of film and video, along with 3 million still images.

While the speeds and feeds portion of the presentation was inspiring for its scope and scale, what was most shocking was the mindset. Behind this project is a deep, societal appreciation of archives as a public good that must be publicly funded. If this project were similarly scaled in the U.S., e.g. on a per capita basis, this would be a $4.1 billion dollar project. Sounds about right to me.

Swedish National Archive of Recorded Sound Digitizing 1.5mm Hours of AV Materials

• June 15th, 2007

The Swedish National Archive of Recorded Sound and Moving Images (SLBA) is in the process of digitizing 1.5mm hours of recorded sound and television. “VHS tapes are being migrated robotically to MPEG-2 and browsing files at a rate of 252 hours per day through 12 VHS players running 24 hours per day, seven days a week.” More on the AMIA-L list.

Video, Education, and Open Content

• May 22nd, 2007

Columbia’s CCNMTL is hosting a conference today and tomorrow. Paul Gerhardt of the BBC Creative Archive, Peter Brantley of Digital Library Federation, and Murray Weston of British Universities Film and Video Council just wrapped up, Rick Prelinger is taking questions now.

More at Isabel Hilborn’s blog.

Technorati Tags: open video, CCNMTL

Washington Post editorial on saving NDIIPP & digital heritage

• May 15th, 2007

Jim Barksdale and Francine Berman make the case for NDIIPP and for preservation in an editorial, Saving Our Digital Heritage, in today’s Washington Post. This is a big deal, because however cogent the arguments of preservationists, they won’t count for anything unless they are heard. (I hope the Post makes the link permanent).

Metavid receives $157K from Sunlight Foundation

• May 9th, 2007

Metavid has received a $157,000 grant from the Sunlight Foundation.

Metavid is a system for archiving and annotating video, and making it publicly accessible. The initial focus is on Congressional proceeding captured off-air from C-SPAN. Making this footage easily accessible will improve transparency, and help create a better public dialog around legislative proceedings.

Congratulations to Aphid, Michael, and Warren, and to the Sunlight Foundation.

Archives and the Shooting Ratio

• May 1st, 2007

This is another part of the television archiving problem/issue/opportunity: documentaries may show 1 percent of the footage captured. It would be great to see the other 99 percent.

From Current.org:

Unedited version of Crossroads soldier stories available:

WETA, which oversaw production of the America at a Crossroads series, will make an uncensored version of one of the films, Operation Homecoming, available to stations that request it but hasn’t publicized the offering, reports the Los Angeles Times. PBS will only offer a sanitized version of the film depicting soldiers’ war stories, some of which include profanity. “Our policy, in the name of trying to eliminate errors so a station doesn’t unwittingly punch up the wrong version, is to keep it relatively clean and straightforward,” said John Wilson, PBS programming chief. The film is scheduled for 10 p.m. Monday, which falls within the FCC’s “safe harbor” for edgy content, but will air an hour earlier in the central time zone.

Paid Content: BBC To Unveil Plans For Massive Online Program Archive

• April 16th, 2007

BBC To Unveil Plans For Massive Online Program Archive:

The BBC will this week announce plans for a massive online program archive. Speaking to paidContent.org, a BBC spokesperson confirmed a report in the Sunday Observer that the corporation aims to put “nearly a million hours” of its rich TV, radio and even paper documents archive online. The broadcaster already has begun digitizing vast amounts of content, though the issue of rights clearance with program-makers for such an undertaking frankly sounds like a nightmare.

The BBC spokesperson said future media and technology director Ashley Highfield will announce the plans at the MipTV conference in Cannes, France, on Wednesday. “The ambition is to unlock the BBC’s content,” she said. “There will be a trial lasting six months but, as yet, there is no date for that. We will make it available to a wide array of testers to see how they use it. It will ultimately sit together with the Creative Archive. It will be free, yes - as with everything, there will be certain costs associated with worldwide distribution, but there are no details on that yet.”

….

Pictorial histories of TV sets

• April 6th, 2007

Wired’s pictorial history of tv sets is fun, and drawn mainly from TV History.tv.

Online Expatriate TV Channel Aggregator JumpTV Raises $100 Million In IPO on AIM

• February 26th, 2007

Via Paid Content:

Online Expatriate TV Channel Aggregator JumpTV Raises $100 Million In IPO on AIM:

JumpTV, a Canada-based online TV channel aggregator, focused mainly on the expatriate markets, has announce completion of its IPO on London’s AIM market, and is going to raise about $100 million. The company sold about 13 million of its common shares to a syndicate of underwriters led by Canaccord Capital Corporation and Morgan Stanley Canada and including Paradigm Capital, Loewen, Ondaatje, McCutcheon Limited and GMP Securities.

The shares will start trading on AIM market in London tomorrow. If the overallotment option that it has granted its underwriters is fully exercised, the gross proceeds of the offering would rise to about $115 million.

Reuters: The Toronto-based company said it is currently looking at “various” acquisitions, adding that “although no agreements or understandings have been reached and no commitments made with respect to any transaction, there have been significant discussions in certain cases.”

Details in release.

Related:

– Online Expatriate TV Channel Aggregator JumpTV Aims for $59 Million IPO

– Online Video Aggregator JumpTV To Buy Hispanic Sports Site SportsYa

AAP’s credibility in question over the Nature expose

• February 8th, 2007

It doesn’t usually pay to lose the tone of cool rationality, but what is the right response to a concerted effort to mislead the public and relevant decision makers about open access, and about the business objectives of certain academic publishers?

The desperation shown here by the AAP’s Brian Crawford may be proof that this is an industry that will be remade despite the objections of the incumbents. But just as the Tobacco Institute’s long campaign against the free exchange of research results was a danger to public health, the AAP’s ability to pour money into deceptive PR campaigns remains a threat to the public interest.

Fortunately, the AAP’s responses to the Nature article have only further reduced its credibility with the audience its members claim to serve. But if the AAP is untrustworthy, how much can we trust its members? Or is it time for some of those publishers to think again about their membership in AAP, or at least changes in the executive staff?

More from Peter Suber:

AAP’s letter to Nature: Kristen Philipkoski, with Randy Dotinga and Scott Carney, Open-Access Debate: Wiley’s View, Wired News, February 8, 2007.

While researching a story about open access, I’ve been in touch with the publishing firms that reportedly hired a p.r. firm to help them create a message in opposition to pending legislation regarding open access.

A spokeswoman for Wiley declined to comment and referred me to a letter to the editor that publishers spokesperson Brian Crawford (see more about him in a previous post) sent to Nature after it broke the story of the hiring of the publicists:

To the Editor:

The premise of the Jan. 24 article by Jim Giles raises disturbing questions, and was extremely misleading by its omissions and errors. In an attempt to portray in a negative manner the intentions of our Association (of which Nature’s parent firm is itself a member, a fact Mr. Giles chose not to report), the article used innuendo and ad hominem attacks rather than facts in an attempt to smear a group of fine organizations and individuals who are working in the interests of science and the public good.

The genesis of Mr. Giles’ report should also prompt concern. Why are some people more interested in PR firms than real issues? Are they afraid of other voices entering the debate? Why is there no reporting on the millions of dollars spent by open access advocates to promote their perspective?

What these parties don’t want others to know is that Association of American Publishers partners with the World Health Organization to provide free access to thousands of medical journals in developing countries; how AAP publishers are helping the National Institutes of Health to archive and link articles for public access; how AAP publishers were instrumental in conceiving patientINFORM.org with top health organizations to provide free medical research information to patients and their caregivers, and how millions of research articles are freely available by publishers’ independent actions.

Non-profit and commercial publishers today give scientists, doctors and the public more access to more information than ever before. It is publishers who invest in peer-review, print and online dissemination, and archiving, not taxpayers. All this debate boils down to is some people wanting something for nothing.

The unintended consequences of government mandated open access are real and potentially damaging, and we will fulfill our responsibility to communicate those risks because doing so is in the best interest of science and society.

Brian D. Crawford, Ph.D.
Chairman, Executive Council
Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division
Association of American Publishers

Also see a follow-up conversation with Brian Crawford (same authors, same source, same day).

Comments.

1. This is the second public response from the AAP asserting that the Nature article is inaccurate but declining to point out specific inaccuracies. (See my comment on the first.)
2. The Nature article has generated a wave of criticism of the AAP, Elsevier, Wiley, and the ACS. But in this letter, Crawford chooses to ignore the actual criticism and respond to non-existent criticism. I haven’t seen anyone say or imply that they are afraid of other voices entering the debate or that the public should not know about the AAP’s commitment to HINARI and patientINFORM. Of course the AAP should communicate any risks it sees in OA policy proposals. The real criticism that Crawford doesn’t address in this letter, or his previous letter, is that the AAP appears willing to subordinate the job of communicating those perceived risks to a campaign of disinformation (”Public access equals government censorship”) and diversion (”[I]f the other side is on the defensive, it doesn’t matter if they can discredit your statements”). If the Nature version of the facts that gave rise to this criticism is inaccurate, Crawford could do everyone a favor by showing it.
3. Do supporters of national OA mandates like FRPAA want something for nothing? No. We want something for something. Crawford is forgetting that taxpayers have already paid for the underlying research and that publishers pay nothing to receive the written results. Yes, publishers add value to those results. But if publishers and taxpayers both make a contribution to the value of peer-reviewed articles arising from publicly-funded research, then what’s the best way to split this baby? The FRPAA solution is a reasonable compromise: a period of exclusivity for the publisher followed by free online access for the public. If the AAP wants to block OA mandates per se, rather than just negotiate the embargo period, then it’s saying that it wants no compromise, that the public should get nothing for its investment, and that publishers should control access to research conducted by others, written up by others, and funded by taxpayers. I’d call that getting something for nothing.

Technorati Tags: propaganda, open access, publishing

(repost) More toll access to public resources

• January 29th, 2007

Peter Suber on the Corbis/Smithsonian deal:

More toll access to public resources:

Brett Zongker, Smithsonian and Corbis Enter Media Deal, The San Francisco Chronicle, January 28, 2007.  Excerpt:

The Smithsonian Institution and Corbis Corp. announced a deal Wednesday to begin selling images from the Smithsonian’s collections for editorial and commercial use through the digital media company.

Under the licensing agreement, Corbis will provide hundreds of images from the Smithsonian museums, including archival photos and images of cultural objects, paintings, sculptures, aircraft and space vehicles….

Smithsonian officials said they hope the agreement with Corbis will make museum resources more easily accessible and offer some images in a digital format for the first time….

There is no guaranteed annual revenue under the deal, and Corbis did not provide any money up front, said Smithsonian spokeswoman Samia Elia. Licensing fees charged for each image would go back into the museum’s educational programs. The royalties from image sales vary each year, she said. No other financial terms were disclosed….

Corbis has similar arrangements with the National Gallery in London, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia, and the Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York, said Corbis spokesman Dan Perlet….

The deal follows the Smithsonian’s semi-exclusive TV deal with Showtime Networks Inc. for use of museum resources for filming projects….Under the deal, the Smithsonian reviews proposals for commercial documentaries from other filmmakers before granting access to its archives. Of the 117 applications received during the first nine months of the contract, two proposals were denied due to the Showtime deal, according to a report by the Government Accountability Office.  The Showtime deal guarantees the Smithsonian $500,000 a year for 30 years and possibly more, depending on the popularity of the Smithsonian channel, Smithsonian Secretary Lawrence Small has said.

Thanks to New Museums for the alert and for these comments:

There has been some backlash surrounding the Showtime decision - yet, the Corbis deal is proceeding without review or challenge by the public. Perhaps this reflects that private image wholesaling is not an entirely new trend; similar agreements have been reached with the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Still, the incorporation of the Smithsonian raises the profile and stakes within the cultural sector. Amongst the pertinent issues for public (if not Congressional) review:

• How does the concept of cultural patrimony seem relevant to the “public good” if that patrimony is leveraged in the service of private interests?
• Is the Smithsonian also granting free/open access for researchers, developers and the creative commons to leverage those very same images and resources?
• Will the institute leverage the revenue from this deal to fund greater open access and innovation initiatives or just fill budget gaps?

In my opinion, the primary issue in this case is not the institute searching for new revenue streams or receiving licensing fees for its property, but rather the choice to explore closed, revenue-driven platforms for dispersing the content of the nonprofit sector. The most contentious quote from the article is the statement “Smithsonian officials said they hope the agreement with Corbis will make museum resources more easily accessible and offer some images in a digital format for the first time.” Accessible to whom? This type of deal sets a dangerous trend of narrow-casting Museum services in all the worst ways - cultural capital in the service of private interests on proprietary platforms.

(repost) The Flawed Agreement between the National Archives and Footnote, Inc.

• January 21st, 2007

Dan Cohen describes another instance of a public works exploited for private gain:

The Flawed Agreement between the National Archives and Footnote, Inc.



I suppose it’s not breaking news that libraries and archives aren’t flush with cash. So it must be hard for a director of such an institution when a large corporation, or even a relatively small one, comes knocking with an offer to digitize one’s holdings in exchange for some kind of commercial rights to the contents. But as a historian worried about open access to our cultural heritage, I’m a little concerned about the new agreement between Footnote, Inc. and the United States National Archives. And I’m surprised that somehow this agreement has thus far flown under the radar of all of those who attacked the troublesome Smithsonian/Showtime agreement. Guess what? From now until 2012 it will cost you $100 a year, or even more offensively, $1.99 a page, for online access to critical historical documents such as the Papers of the Continental Congress.




This was the agreement signed by Archivist of the United States Allen Weinstein and Footnote, Inc., a Utah-based digital archives company, on January 10, 2007. For the next five years, unless you have the time and money to travel to Washington, you’ll have to fork over money to Footnote to take a peek at Civil War pension documents or the case files of the early FBI. The National Archives says this agreement is “non-exclusive”—I suppose crossing their fingers that Google will also come along and make a deal—but researchers shouldn’t hold their breaths for other options.




Footnote.com, the website that provide access to these millions of documents, charges for anything more than viewing a small thumbnail of a page or photograph. Supposedly the value-added of the site (aside from being able to see detailed views of the documents) is that it allows you to save and annotate documents in your own library, and share the results of your research (though not the original documents). Hmm, I seem to remember that there’s a tool being developed that will allow you to do all of that—for free, no less.




Moreover, you’ll also be subject to some fairly onerous terms of usage on Footnote.com, especially considering that this is our collective history and that all of these documents are out of copyright. (For a detailed description of the legal issues involved here, please see Chapter 7 of Digital History, “Owning the Past?”, especially the section covering the often bogus claims of copyright on scanned archival materials.) I’ll let the terms speak for themselves (plus one snide aside): “Professional historians and others conducting scholarly research may use the Website [gee, thanks], provided that they do so within the scope of their professional work, that they obtain written permission from us before using an image obtained from the Website for publication, and that they credit the source. You further agree that…you will not copy or distribute any part of the Website or the Service in any medium without Footnote.com’s prior written authorization.”




Couldn’t the National Archives have at least added a provision to the agreement with Footnote to allow students free access to these documents? I guess not; from the terms of usage: “The Footnote.com Website is intended for adults over the age of 18.” What next? Burly bouncers carding people who want to see the Declaration of Independence?

Berkeley Center for Law and Technology Conference: Conference on Copyright, Digital Rights Management Technologies, and Consumer Protection

• January 2nd, 2007

From Mary Hodder:

Berkeley Center for Law and Technology Conference: Conference on Copyright, Digital Rights Management Technologies, and Consumer Protection:

Is happening March 9 and 10, 2007. Go register. The last one was great! It was organized by Pam Samuelson and Eddan Katz, who both did an outstanding job. Lots of interesting folks spoke, and some pretty monumental things were said about technology, the internet, TV and users. Also, the resource page for that event was incredible.

These conferences are high quality and thoughtful. If you have any interest in DRM and media, you will *actually* learn something at this event.

Info is here:

Predictions that digital rights management (DRM) technologies will be the predominant mode of distribution of digital content have been prevalent for at least the last decade. Yet, roll-out of DRM technologies has been somewhat slower than many expected, in part owing to consumer resistance to some DRM content and in part owing to the technical challenges that must be overcome to create the infrastructure for DRM content. Many digital content providers believe that DRM content will be good for consumers because it enables new opportunities for content to be delivered in a variety of packages.

However, technically protected content can raise significant consumer protection concerns. One example is Sony BMG’s sale of copy-protected CDs that installed “rootkit” software on the computers of purchasers, making their computers vulnerable to attack. Another example is legislation recently proposed in France to require firms, such as Apple, to disclose information to enable other digital music platforms besides the iPod to be interoperable with iTunes music.

The BCLT/BTLJ/IViR symposium will draw attention to a range of issues from technological, business, academic, artistic, and public interest sectors in the United States and abroad. We expect a broad audience of high tech lawyers, information technology and content industry representatives, technologists, and some policymakers. By bringing together these various perspectives, we hope to educate the audience about the consumer protection ramifications of DRM technologies and raise the level of discourse about DRM law and policy issues. This conference will facilitate cross-disciplinary and cross-industry discussion on this important topic. Seven invited papers will be published in a symposium volume of BTLJ following the conference. These articles, as well as discourse among panelists, will contribute to the policy debate and to the literature on DRM and consumer protection law and policy issues.

Jennifer Urban: “Digital Rights Management is broken”

• December 21st, 2006

Jennifer Urban: “Digital Rights Management is broken”:

Jennifer Urban and Cory Doctorow spoke in tandem at the December 14 DIY Media seminar. I will post separate entries, although their presentations were closely related.

“DRM is broken,” Urban declared, at the beginning of her talk about “Bits will never get harder to copy: the limits of copyright online.” (Apparently, according to a separate report, Bill Gates agrees) The problem, as the graphic below illustrates, is that until DRM started building legal restrictions on the use of cultural products into the hardware used to access those products, the relationship between technological capabilities, laws, and social changes was flexible enough to allow copyright laws to evolve with the times. When radio came along and enabled the broadcast of music that had previously been accessed through live performance or sheet music, the legal remedy of compulsory licensing enabled rights owners to be compensated and for a new medium for musical performance to grow. DRM, together with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which criminalizes circumvention of DRM measures, puts an end to that flexibility by instantiating in technology a social agreement that used to be mediated by courts: “DRM stops the change process” that been evolving since the establishment of copyright laws.

“Fair use,” fundamental to education, scholarship, and the arts, is broken because the rights holder, not a legal process, determines the boundaries, and “DMCA makes breaking DRM to enable fair use illegal.”

In addition to the social damage caused by cutting the legal system out of the process of determining the limits of licenses for cultural products, Urban pointed out that DRM leads to disasters like the Sony rootkit fiasco, in which hundreds of thousands of Sony CDs were distributed with DRM protections that installed malware on the computers of people who simply wanted to listen to music — compounded later by the exploitation of the malware by hackers.

Jennifer Urban is a Fellow at the USC Annenberg Center and a Clinical Associate Professor of Law at USC. She teaches Intellectual Property and classes related to Technology Law and Policy. She also is the Director of the USC Intellectual Property Clinic, where students learn intellectual property law through hands-on work with cutting-edge, real-world projects. She is a faculty member of the USC Center for Communication Law and Policy.

Originally posted by Howard Rheingold from DIY Media Weblog, ReBlogged by yatta on Dec 19, 2006 at 12:08 AM

Dabble Playlist Contest: Take the Dabble Challenge

• December 8th, 2006

Dabble Playlist Contest: Take the Dabble Challenge:

Dabble, my company, is running a playlist challenge contest.

Details are here, and today’s challenge is for playlists on funny animals. There is a challenge each day where winners each get a tshirt and entry into the finals. On Dec 31, the finals made by the winners from the rest of the month will compete for $500 (grand prize) and a video iPod (runner up).

Go make your playlist or favorite the best ones!

Conference: Rethinking Television Histories

• December 2nd, 2006

Conference: Rethinking Television Histories:

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