Preserving Digital Public Television: Preparing for the Broadcast Afterlife

Abstract

In less than a decade, television production, distribution and preservation has undergone a radical shift. Today, programs are nearly all shot, edited, and shared as digital files. Video recording and editing systems are now well within the means of most members of the public, and the ubiquity of media on the Internet, coupled with the mass deployment of hand-held devices, have transformed not only the medium of television but the entire environment for creating and watching moving images. Distribution and transmission have been equally transformed, as tape-based submissions to the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and other national program services are being replaced by digital file transfers. On-demand viewing is growing just as on-air signals become all-digital, when every analog transmitter is turned off in 2009. Preserving Digital Public Television, a project funded by the National Digital Information and Infrastructure Program of the Library of Congress (NDIIPP) set out to solve some of these difficult problems by designing a model repository for public television. In the process, the project also determined standards for metadata, explored rights issues relating to video archives, analyzed operating costs, and brought a new consciousness about the importance of digital preservation to the public television system.