Exploiting TV's riches

Emily Bell

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It's time for media companies to blow the dust off their archives.

It's interesting to see Jana Bennett is promising a web page for every episode of every show on the BBC. She gets tops marks for indulging in the trendy sport of atomising your content. This should become an incredibly powerful tool for powering the BBC archive to yet more imperial success.

It is also a moment for the rest of the industry, indies and broadcasters alike, to take stock of what their archive could do for them. Here in the world of text we talk of little else, although getting the darn thing right is seldom as straightforward as it should be, largely, I suspect, because when anyone says the word "archive" one has a reflexive Reggie Perrin-like tendency to imagine an enormous dog-eared, leather-bound volume having the dust blown off it by an elderly gentleman.

But if I was in charge of a broadcaster's archive, or even an independent's back catalogue, I would be arguing that this should be the number one priority for fixing and exploiting before another second of material is made.

If you want to find out anything about most media organisations, their history, their shows, or their personnel, it is better to go to Wikipedia or IMDB than the organisation itself. The BBC's Wikipedia page organises things about the corporation rather more sensibly than the BBC website. As a colleague in development suggested, if you become the default source for Wikipedia, or any other historical online archive, imagine what it could do for your ratings.

This compelling big picture is neither new nor a particularly rapid path to riches. A friend of mine was working on an early iteration of this BBC project at least three years ago when, in a couple of afternoons, some talented developers proved you could crack open the contributor and cast archive and attach it to shows. The enthusiasm for the project was quickly met by a tide of panic over who would then deal with the demands from Equity or disgruntled agents over potentially unpaid fees.

However, in the spirit of the BBC changing its relationship with the rest of the media, why doesn't it create an open online archive of all programmes? Other broadcasters and producers would have to sort out the rights, but imagine if you could jump from one episode of Doctor Who co-written by Stephen Moffatt to every show everywhere Stephen Moffatt has ever written. Creating the tools for other broadcasters and publishers to use which allows everything to appear in one massive British Library of television would be a striking achievement.
Emily Bell is director of digital content, Guardian News and Media