BBC Programme Index: 9M listings and 221k playable programmes | Hacker News Reader

BBC Programme Index: 9M listings and 221k playable programmes

genome.ch.bbc.co.uk

113 pointstimthorn64 comments

Is any of the material indexed by the site available to international viewers on the site (legally)?

The BBC is a treasure-trove of historical and culturally significant content. Unfortunately, accessing BBS programs from outside of the UK is a painstaking process of tracking it down from other sources and there is no guarantee of success.

> Unfortunately, accessing BB[C] programs from outside of the UK is a painstaking process

Is that true? I think all radio content (which to be honest is by far the best bit) is available without any account or geolocation. Maybe that's changed in the last year but I used to stream Radio 4 without problem when in the US and Canada.

If people outside the UK are curious of what the BBC is capable of I'd suggest starting with the In Our Time archive https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/2Dw1c7rxs6DmyK0pMR.... I think it's constantly extraordinarily good.

The Life Scientific with Jim Al-Khalili is also great

Worth starting from the very first episode

So according to Wikipedia, the British TV license is currently about 220 USD a year, which works out to a bit over $18 a month. They'd probably get away with charging exactly the same amount for overseas streaming. I wonder if they realize that.

I expect exclusive licensing and distribution deals are the biggest hiccup as usual.

Exactly, the BBC gets shows cheap by only accquiring the UK rights.

The production companies then get the prestige of "shown on the BBC" when doing foreign sales.

They realise it, they created britbox which has the BBC, ITV,Channel 4 and Channel 5, basically all the historic over the air tv channels in the UK.

Anything they can legally get away with licensing to international audiences is in it I think.

They don't want to damage the international distribution arm of the BBC (used to be BBC Worldwide), which runs channels like BBC America and BBC World (not World Service radio, or world service TV), and sells programs like Doctor Who to Netflix or whatever, and does Britbox - that arm makes $200m a year

The BBC originally tried to launch britbox (or another VOD service) back in 2009 when netflix was mainly still posting dvds to people, but it was shut down by the government.

The international content (inc. Britbox) is only available in a limited number of countries. As a British expat living in Europe I'd happily pay £15/mo (same as the license fee) for access to live free-to-air TV - and I know quite a few people learning English who prefer to watch British TV rather than American TV. The only way to do so though seems to be VPNs or IPTV services, which are of course a legal grey area (I'm the other side of Europe, so satellite won't work).

For reference https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BritBox#Failed_%22Project_Kang...

This is really neat! I could find a limited subset of Radio 1's Essential Mix, it looks like searching for specific DJ's yields better results.

There are a few sets that I've found on Youtube from the 90's and I think it would be awesome if I could find the same ones on BBC. Will return and see if there's more that I can scour for, thanks for sharing.

Historic tracklistings for the Essentials Selection are still online: https://www.bbc.co.uk/radio1/petetong/tracklistings2002.shtm...

Thanks for sharing this link!

Cool. The Essential Mixes are, well, essential for people into electronic music. Some of the more famous ones are available in high quality, like the Goa Mix, but most I've had to find in YouTube and are of dubious quality. A high quality archive of all Essential Mixes, preferably without the radio compression, would be great.

The mixing bowl is an above-board torrent community with HQ packs of essential mixes

Blake's 7? Nope. The Young Ones? Nope. Oh well.

This is a pretty good reason: https://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/faqs#why-are-there-missing-listi... Much of the input is scraped via scanning and OCR from physical copies of a magazine that is decades old.

I did find one episode of Blakes 7 listed: https://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/98edb93a0b8d4797a7b6892c25c30e00

The Young Ones inveigled its way into my psyche growing up and I'm sure I'd be a different person if I hadn't watched and rewatched it. Incredibly of-its-time-UK 80s now, but wild nonetheless. There's a low-quality VHS rip on the 'net somewhere of the frantic production process of the show which is both slightly enchantment-breaking and fascinating. They did so many takes of the circular-saw-through-the-bed gag due to technical issues! Without the laugh track production all sounds rather stressful for everyone, but also shows how much in-house BBC known-how was involved in the production.

If you're a BBC fan have a listen to Alexi Sayle reminisce about the 'good old days', it's sadly not what it used to be... https://audioboom.com/channels/5038428

Well, it does somewhat illustrate the vast number of historic recordings that national broadcasting companies like the BBC have decided not to make available to the public who paid for them to be produced in the first place.

It's the same, but much worse in Sweden - the national radio service here has imitated the BBC since its inception in the 1920s. It's much the same across Europe, I think.

Edit: Talking about radio/audio below.

What's perhaps sadder is the number of programmes the BBC broadcast and recorded, but erased.

Just because a company produced a piece of media doesn't mean they have the right to stream that media.

That's somewhat of an excuse until like 1996 or so.

That is a super aggressive timeframe for when media companies started caring about online streaming. And even after streaming became a consideration, it is not a consideration for absolutely every project. Some media is produced without the intent to ever stream it and preemptively securing the streaming rights is therefore an added and unnecessary cost.

Not really. Pretty much every single national broadcaster of note used Realnetworks streaming in 1995-1996. They just didn't care for archiving, just like they don't care about that today.

I'm American so I can't say I'm too familiar with how the BBC was streaming content in the 90s, but RealNetworks didn't have video streaming technology until 1997[1] so the BBC surely wasn't using them for anything but maybe radio in 1995-1996.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RealNetworks#History

I'm talking about radio/audio. Sorry if that wasn't obvious.

Oh, that certainly changes the timeline. The linked BBC Programme Index includes both television and radio so there was no reason for anyone here to assume you were only talking about radio.

NP. I talked about radio in the top level comment and then loads of people commented and the comment tree grew very large quickly.

The BBC's charter limits how long they can put content on iPlayer.

Yeah, why would anyone want an historic record of e.g. newscasts etc to be publicly accessible. That could only cause trouble!

Coincidentally I just commented[1] earlier today about someone who is going exactly what you are looking for with American newscasts. It is likely a time consuming project and can get expensive depending on how public the "publicly accessible" requirement is, but it is doable for a single person or small group.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27551712

Where? This is the current Charter:

https://web.archive.org/web/20170806225843if_/http://downloa...

I've only skim read it but then it's only 40 odd pages long.

Dutch public broadcast, paid from taxes, even added Widevine DRM to the online player a few years back. It's a massive PITA because the player is kinda bad and constantly buffering. I wouldn't even mind so much if it actually worked well :-/

When they added it they even trolled people for a day or so by having all the non-DRM requests download a clip from Office Space (the "mine!" stapler guy), so that's what all the downloader scripts ended up downloading.

When rights agreements were set up nobody could conceive of the idea of streaming. Unfortunately the BBC do not always own all the rights to broadcast something, and I can imagine it's basically impossible to retroactively untangle that.

You're painting them as fools, while you're really playing Captain Hindsight.

After 1996 streaming became obvious because of Realnetworks. Are BBC news brodcasts playable from back then?

How many Realnetworks streams from 1996 are playable today? I’d wager not many.

By 1996 it was obvious that streaming video was technically possible. I don’t think it was anywhere near as obvious that it would become a cultural force to the extent that it has, nor that archiving such streams was particularly important. Not to mention the monetary angle: such deals would have cost the BBC more money and I’m not sure the majority of the population would have seen it as a worthy use of money at the time.

Audio, not video. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RealAudio

Where can I find these streams now?

You're talking about people finding out that streaming was technically possible, not that society would adopt it as the way to distribute content in the future.

> Where can I find these streams now?

I'm asking the exact same thing. For some reason at least the European national tax/license-paid broadcasters that I have direct knowledge of only serve a very small portion of their back catalog. Even when there are no third parties to worry about.

> I'm asking the exact same thing.

Lol well then why give it an example of the BBC backward if nobody else was doing it?

Nobody else had a time machine either. Why are you giving them a hard time over it?

I'm giving European national radio broadcasters in general a hard time because the have chosen not to prioritize public access to old radio broadcasts that the public in those countries already paid for.

There is a clear pattern that simply does not make sense (unless there's systematic corruption or mismanagement).

> that the public in those countries already paid for

But they presumably didn't pay for streaming rights and for contracts with streaming residuals - isn't that the point? Isn't that the whole problem? Otherwise... they'd be streaming them.

That's what I've been trying to say. Most radio programs made by European national broadcasters are fully financed by themselves. Programs containing music is a separate story, of course.

Nevertheless, I've haven't seen a European broadcaster that has a reasonable ~20 year archive of their own news/political analysis/etc shows online. (Perhaps one exists, though?)

They point is that they have had 20+ years to figure this out, and they typically haven't. My understanding is that this kind of content is available for a year and then removed.

> Most radio programs made by European national broadcasters are fully financed by themselves ... Nevertheless ...

Fully financing something doesn't say anything about the contract you agreed and the terms of residuals for your talent and other resources you used. If you didn't agree a residual for 'streaming', which you were unlikely to do until maybe 2007 or so, then 'fully financing' it would not help you.

That's the part they have had 20 years to figure out.

Nobody was expecting streaming to be the main way we consumed content back in 2001. You're using that time machine again.

So that time machine explains how I can't listen to e.g. news or political analysis broadcasts from say 2016 from a public broadcaster in a typical European country, in 2021?

Well where did you get 20 years from? What happened in 2001?

I'm ending this here. This is clearly not going anywhere that's meaningful.

In 1996, almost everyone in the UK was still on dialup. Real videos typically resulted in significant latency for a not great quality image. As such, streaming wasn't obvious at that time, at least as a ubiquitous access medium.

(Audio, not video. Doesn't anyone remember that Realnetworks only did audio at first?) Okay, let's say that high audio quality (mp3 128 kbps) audio streaming wasn't obvious until the year 2000. Surely after year 2000 all of the rights must have been worked out and all of the radio shows were properly stored and served for public on-demand consumption?

Nope.

> Unfortunately the BBC do not always own all the rights to broadcast something

This is not something that happened by accident. For the last thirty years governments of all stripes have been forcing the BBC to outsource more and more of their production to independent companies. The BBC (or rather me and you) pay for the production and the production company keeps the rights.

When the government recently forced the BBC to publish presenter salaries, they then complained that much of the information they wanted was out of their reach because the programmes were made by independent companies. No shit!

Even if the BBC made absolutely everything in-house they still would have contracts with individual performers and other talent that would have residuals that would have to be negotiated for 'streaming' as a concept.

Even where the BBC produces the programme itself, they can be prevented from streaming if they have included music where streaming rights weren't negotiated.

Micro Men is a brilliant docudrama about the 80s home computer wars in the UK but because of its soundtrack won't even make it to DVD, let alone streaming.

Thanks for the reference googling I found https://youtu.be/XXBxV6-zamM

Wasn’t it standard practice to just record shows over old tapes for a while, leading to the loss of a number of episodes of Doctor Who?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Who_missing_episodes

Back before things like home video was a dot on the horizon, shows were shown once, and tapes cost a fortune

Streaming rights side (since you’ve already mentioned it in other replies), and playing devils advocate here: does the current financial model of the BBC permit the digitisation of all this old material? Could it be a logistical and capacity issue? Did they consider the cost to the public and determine the additional effort/cost outweighs the benefits? Costs being both financial and political.

years ago the BBC had all programs as machine readable RDF – they were leading the semantic web.

All vanished like the dinos – can anybody tell what happened?

Unfortunately the project that hosted the feeds (BBC Backstage) was shut down in 2010: https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcbackstage/2010/10/bbc-backsta...

I was one of the two founders of BBC Backstage, sadly the BBC shut it down a few years after I left as it didn't have the support internally and the BBC became under even greater pressure to save money.

that's a shame. It shone so bright https://www.bbc.co.uk/academy/en/articles/art201307241216586... and inspired my radio recorder to publish raw meta data.

Thanks for that, Ben. I fondly remember your emails...

I organised a talk for the RTS from Simon Parnall about TV Anytime some years prior to Backstage launching and was really excited to see feeds become available from the BBC - and similarly saddened when they died. Ironically, it would have probably been a politically astute thing to keep alive with the push in Government for Open Data at that point.

A number of people loosely connected with BBC Backstage (from inside the BBC at the time and outside of it) went to work for the UK Gov Digital Service under then-minister Francis Maude, which is where a lot of the Open Data stuff came from.

So from that point of view, the work at the BBC did lead to a greater opening from within the government.

I miss the BBC days fondly, very different to what I'm doing now but it was a great era.

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