[Sigia-l] BBC

[jfpetit at ideactif.com]

> Do you know of any other release of such massive quantities 
> of entertainment and non-entertainment material comparable to 
> BBC's anywhere else in the world?

Actually, Société Radio-Canada / CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation)
have had an "Archives" site up since mid-2002 (http://archives.cbc.ca/,
http://archives.radio-canada.ca/). As principal IA, acting as an outside
consultant, I've had the pleasure to design the whole thing from scratch
with a small team, starting in November of 2001. Since then, the team
has gone to quite larger, maybe 25 people overall.

The approach taken by Radio-Canada/CBC is quite different than the one
the BBC seems to want to take. A "storytelling" angle was adopted from
the start, with a strong slant to serve mainly as an educational
resource (the "teachers" section is quite well-stocked with pedagogical
material). Just putting up "old stuff" without context was not a way to
go. Also, it was found out very early that negotiating rights to most of
the fiction material would be a nightmare, since a lot of people
appearing in the shows were deceased, had disapeared from the business,
were impossible to reach, etc. Negotiating with families or estates is
exruciatingly long and costly, not to mention the demands made by
Artist's and Performer's Unions. Same thing with sporting events, whose
broadcasting rights usually belong to very powerful national and
international federations or associations. What was left were basically
public affairs and news content (still a huge pool to choose from), so
the actual site is heavily biased towards such contents. It will be
interesting to see how the BBC resolves that conundrum. I wish them the
best of luck!

Jean-François Petit - jfpetit at ideactif.com
Idéactif Conseil - www.ideactif.com