March 2008
The world’s video archives is about to change dramatically. Amid rapid digitalization and convergence of broadcasting and telecommunications, reconstruction of archives aiming at stocking moving images is underway and the new services such as VOD are being developed.
The key players of the reconstruction are two giant commercial archives, Getty Images/Image Bank in the Unites States and ITN Source in Britain. They have been acquiring private archives one after another and have aggressively started selling footage all over the world. Public service broadcasters such as the BBC and ZDF are also acquiring other archives and developing content distribution business through their affiliates. While commercial archives are expanding world-wide VOD services, state-own archives and public broadcasters are trying to launch their own VOD services using archived content. Following France’s L’institut national de l’audiovisuel (INA) that launched a VOD service in 2006, the BBC and ZDF started the service in July and September 2007, respectively. NHK is also preparing for the introduction of the service in December 2008. As commercial services of video archives expand significantly, there is a looming challenge regarding how to develop public service usage of archives, such as opening to researchers. In Britain, British Film Institute (BFI) make their collection of films and television programs available to researchers. In terms of academic use of broadcast archives, France’s INA is most advanced, with their collection being available to researches at INAthèque in the national library of France. In Japan, the Tokyo National Museum’s film center houses a large number of motion picture footage, but the digitization or research usages of them show little progress. Approximately 9,000 TV programs produced by NHK and commercial broadcasters can be viewed at the Broadcast Library and 5,000 programs at NHK’s broadcast library, but it is still insufficient for academic researches. It is high time to consider the possibility of opening up of NHK Archives to researchers or foundation of national video archives.