BBC sees possibilities with online archive

Researchers at the BBC have been studying how to put the Corporation's archive online after chairman Michael Grade labelled it public property and said that it should, as far as possible, be made freely available.

There are formidable obstacles to placing the entire archive online, which amounts to a national memory bank involving copyright, repeat fees and partnership deals. But engineers now know what would be required to do so.

Staff at the BBC's research and development lab near Gatwick airport estimate that the entire archive could be stored at production quality on hard-disk arrays occupying an area equivalent to between five and eight floors of London's Canary Wharf.

But the number of disks required should plummet in the future with data densities expected to increase in line with Moore's Law on processor speeds.

In the first instance, at least, the archive would be very useful for internal use. The fact that it could be available for streaming is already focusing minds on how much publicly-owned content should be freely available for non-commercial use.

The BBC is doing some other navel gazing as its Charter comes up for review, and radical ideas are being thrown about.

It is developing an open source video codec, called Dirac, to replace the Real Networks software currently used to stream video from the BBC site. This could challenge other commercial formats, including Microsoft's Windows Media Player 9.

BBC researchers are also grappling with other implications of the convergence of computing with consumer electronics, including the possibility that easy TV recording on cheap portable devices could see consumers start to view programmes in chunks, rather like reading a book.