Students from the MA programme Preservation and Presentation of the Moving Image participated in the 2014 World Conference of FIAT/IFTA. They share their impressions in a series of blog reports. Britt Patterson wrote this report.
On the 3rd day of the 2014 FIAT/IFTA World conference in Amsterdam the plenary session Make the Difference: How Broadcast Archives Can Serve the New Media Environment started off the day.
The focus of the session included challenges faced by archives, and proposed solutions, in serving their audience in the changing digital landscape. The presenters included Goeron Schoen and Martin Bo Ericson of SVT, Xavier Jacques-Jourion of RTBF, and Tim Manders of Sound & Vision. The session was concluded by a question and answer panel with the presenters, Maggie Lydon of the BBC, and the session moderator Jacqui Gupta, also of the BBC.
The session opened to the crowded room with the question: How do broadcast archives adapt their skill set and experiences to meet demands of new technologies for new workflows and partnerships? Presenters addressed how now, more than ever, the broadcast archive needs to be “a faster and more flexible repository for production, with a solid metadata layer sourced from all platforms.” Each presenter gave an example of the changes and issues that face their broadcast archive in the digital age, as well as innovative approaches to these challenges.
Conference attendees during the coffee break. Photo Credit: Oscar Timmers.
The first presenter, Goeron Schoen of SVT, discussed integrating interactive output with traditional methods of archiving. In the case of SVT this includes recent efforts to integrate content from their archive with interactive & online applications such as news or children’s apps. The idea behind this initiative is to use larger portions of archive material, making the very large amount of information in the collection more widely accessible. Martin Bo Ericson continued the dialogue by pointing out what SVT has done in the direction of delivering and making this information publicly useful, including the ability for users to tag content accessed through interactive services—adding their own descriptions to what they access, thereby making the public a part of organising this information.
Xavier Jacques-Jourion from RTBF, with “Evolution of competitive landscape for broadcasters,” started off by stating that he would not use the phrase “TV is Dead,” posing instead that it just requires a new delivery system in an age of multiple screens linked to a variety of competing content. The television screen is no longer the sole point from which viewers access content, and content is no longer selected for them by broadcasting schedules. Instead, companies such as Netflix allow the streaming of content to multiple screens while gathering statistics on user preferences. This allows for the suggestion of content, giving users the individual choice over the content they watch and the content that is then suggested to them.
Following this trend, Jacques-Jourion proposed that broadcast archives follow suit in making their content available based on statistics gathered from audiences. “Where does that leave us for the archive?” he asked: a call for further development of “being everywhere” the audience is online. This includes using Facebook, Twitter, and any other online platform from which the archive can draw statistics from users. The key here is to gather statistics on users as an “Audience of 1,” using these statistics to allow for a “custom-made” flux of content for the individual user. This leaves room for the broadcasting archive to adapt to the changing environment and to become a centre of information or content, a hub, which provides “sequences” of information to audiences rather than the solitary, pre-determined programmes that defined previous media landscapes.
From the conference venue, overlooking the Amsterdam IJ river. Photo Credit: Oscar Timmers.
Tim Manders from Sound & Vision then presented the idea of embedded thesauri as a way to provide a source of labels for content, eliminating the work of manually filtering and validating purely tag-oriented metadata associated with content.
The question and answer session following included a handful of questions, one notable one directed to Jacques-Jourion: “Is it time to start talking less about ‘archives’ and more about ‘content’?” To which the panel agreed, including Jacques-Jourion, that it was time indeed to adjust the focus as a way to break down a narrow view on offering content from a narrow range of locations. There was also a general agreement on the need, alongside integrating opening up the archive through multiple digital platforms, to re-vise the image of the archive to draw in more audiences: “It’s time that the archive became sexy” stated the audience-member, greeted by nods of agreement from the panel.
More Info
- See more photos, presentations and papers over at the FIAT/IFTA website
- Info about the thesaurus project from Sound & Vision can be found at: http://openskos.beeldengeluid.nl/ and http://gtaa.beeldengeluid.nl/