A few days ago the BBC announced plans to open up its archive of TV and radio programmes for on-demand access. Mention of the BBC’s recent Creative Archive initiative was notable by its absence. According to this latest announcement, Full-length programmes, as well as scripts and notes, will be available for download from the BBC’s […]
BBC
BBC Music web resources updated and integrated
It’s been a long time (2.5 years) since I wrote much about the BBC’s online music resources. Though I still use these resources fairly frequently, I don’t always do so particularly attentively (if you know what I mean), so I don’t know if the changes I noticed today are very recent or months old. Previously […]
Spoofing music recommendation services and personalised radio
Music recommendation services and personalised radio stations like Last.FM depend on tracking the behaviour and preferences of their users, and building personal profiles on the basis of this. So what happens if the data you feed into these services isn’t a human’s preferences, but something else, like the programming of a traditional radio station or […]
Experimental prototype of BBC Programme Catalogue
I missed this at first in the slew of announcements about the BBC Creative Future initiative, but last week the BBC launched an ‘experimental prototype’ of its programme catalogue, comprising details of nearly a million programmes (here’s the relevant press release). Tom Loosemore from the Beeb spoke about this at an event I attended last […]
Musical Battleground — article in The Spectator
My article under the title Musical Battleground is in the arts section of the Christmas issue of The Spectator, out today. It covers the remixing potential of digital media, using the BBC Creative Archive and The Grey Album as examples. Here’s an excerpt: But are the products of this ‘remix culture’ any good? Though technology […]
In-depth music documentary sources
While I was working through all the pages on this site I listened to the last six or seven episodes of The Story of Atlantic on the BBC Radio Player. They were broadcast on 6 Music Plays It Again, and you can still catch some episodes if you’re quick. This was a 14-hour series made […]
Browse interface for BBC Creative Archive clips
Last week the BBC made available the first video content under the terms of the Creative Archive initiative. The footage includes material covering natural history, wildlife, science, locations. I heard there was a hundred hours of footage, though it’s hard to check this; the clips appear to vary in length from under 30 seconds to […]
Licensing of BBC music audio and video
For those of us trying to read the tea leaves concerning how different parts of the enormous BBC archive may be licensed in the future, this Guardian article on a Universal-BBC deal makes interesting reading. “Anything ever recorded or filmed by the BBC by Universal artists since the 1920s to the present day could be […]
BBC geek archive (sort of)
One news service to which I subscribe described the backstage.bbc.co.uk beta as “the talked-about BBC content archive”, which confuses it with the pilot of the Creative Archive, which it isn’t. But it’s easy to see how this confusion arises. The backstage site headline (at the time of writing) is “Build what you want using BBC […]
BBC Online Music Library tender
The BBC has a Request for Information from potential suppliers of an Online Music Library. These suppliers are invited to provide details, within the next month, of the type of music content they can supply, the metadata that goes with it, the available audio formats, and any agreements with music industry publishers and licensing bodies. […]