Your Tube, Whose Dime? (Forbes): “Startup of the moment YouTube, which garnered 12.9 million unique visitors in March, doesn’t care what viewers watch, as long as they keep tuning in. Making money is another matter: The site, which has raised $11.5 million in venture capital in the last year, didn’t see a penny in revenue [...]
Consumer demand for archival quality data storage is growing, though whether disks like this or hosted models like Amazon’s S3 are more practical and reliable isn’t clear yet. A Touch of Gold to Keep Treasured Discs From Degrading: …The new Kodak Preservation DVD-R and CD-R products are made to preserve data for 100 years on [...]
Catalog of nearly 1 million BBC programs online: Cory Doctorow: The BBC has posted an online interface into catalog of 946,614 BBC radio & TV programmes, dating back 75 years — searchable by category, cast and crew. This is a treasure-trove of data. Link to catalog, Link to Tom Loosemore’s commentary (via Ben Hammersley)
Romenesko has pointers to some interesting commentary about VNRs. An archive of VNRs would be another good way to address the problem; Poynter would be a good home for such a project… “Using VNRs is about saving money and feeding the beast”: Read the article Wall Street Journal Clearly, TV news operations don’t disclose the [...]
Culture, Commerce, and Public Media New York, NY June 5 -6 “Culture, Commerce, and Public Media: A New Forum for Creators” is a meeting about how commercial and noncommercial institutions active in culture, education, and media can make their materials–current productions, and legacy content–more openly available. The recent Showtime/Smithsonian agreement has highlighted tensions between stakeholders [...]
Public Broadcasting’s Platforms for Interaction: Todd Mundt has a very useful comparatiave reactions to Gather.com and Public Interactive’s Public Action beta and goes beyond that to talk about requirements for social systems in public broadcasting. Link: Converge. — via Dennis Haarsager’s Technology360
DVguru has a useful comparison of online sharing services. MustSee has another. The new and the old roundups at TechCrunch are also worth reading.
Most archives don’t turn a profit, and many of them are looking for deals with commercial firms that can allow them to keep the lights on, and to serve some footage. Unfortunately, non-profits are often at a disadvantage in their negotiations with for profit firms. The Smithsonian’s new agreement with Showtime is a case in [...]