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BBC planning to open source its archives

Announced last year, the Creative Archive initiative aims to put the entire archive of BBC material online. The first phase will launch this fall, with about 2,000 factual clips of up to three minutes long, mainly from its natural history archive.

'Logical extension' of public service mission

As a broadcaster funded entirely by public license fees, the BBC sees the building of the Creative Archive as a logical extension of its public service remit. Material in the archive will be based on a licensing model developed by Creative Commons. This would allow material to be downloaded and used for whatever purpose on whatever device, so long as it is not put to commercial use.

Paul Gerhardt, joint director of the Creative Archive, said he hoped "the Creative Archive can establish a model for others to follow, providing material for the new generation of digital creatives and stimulating the growth of the creative culture in the U.K."

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a digital rights campaign group, provided written testimony last Saturday before a U.K. government committee evaluating the future role of the BBC.

Cory Doctorow, the EFF's European Affairs coordinator, said the "building of the Creative Archive is a watershed moment in the history of the BBC and of the world. It has the power to strengthen cultural identity of Britons and to lift the world to new heights of creativity, freedom, and cooperation."

In order to reach the broadest range of people and devices, the BBC has also been working for the last couple of years on a video codec for internet streaming called Dirac.

According to the BBC's Research and Development unit, the broadcaster "would like to collaborate with the open source community, academics, and others to produce an open codec. We welcome help and support in creating an open and freely available compression system based on this technology."

Dirac was submitted as a SourceForge project last February, and a 0.4.2 Alpha version was released last week. It is licensed under GPL, LGPL, and the Mozilla Public License.

Cost still a major concern

Cost is a serious issue which the BBC is determined to address. Tim Borer, Dirac project manager, explained, "Ultimately, we would like to support millions of users with streaming services. It is uneconomic to use a codec with a per-user license."

One of the other aspects to the development of an open source approach is the BBC's own public service origins. "We have a different ethos to a commercial company," said Borer. "Open source software development is really a parallel development. It's got the same ethos."

Fergus Cassidy is a technology columnist with The Sunday Tribune and a regular contributor to NewsForge and ITMJ.