The Television Archive Project

Updated January 17, 2000

Introduction

Television has become a major part of the lives of billions of people around the world. It entertains, educates, causes us both joy and anger and impacts even simple things like the type of food we eat. It's truly the global standard for communication of ideas, yet a large proportion of this major part of the global culture is thrown away.

The Television Archive Project was started with funding from the Internet Archive. Their goal is to preserve another part of our culture, specifically the Internet. Our goal is to preserve twenty television channels from around the world for a year. We believe that for future generations, this collection (along with the Internet Archive's work) will become the definitive snapshot of our world.

Tapes, Tapes and Tapes

This undertaking is only possible because of digital television (DTV). Analog television is a bandwidth hog - a single channel occupies 6MHz of bandwidth in North America (more in Europe) - very inefficient in the digital world. DTV compresses the picture resulting in a tiny fraction of the data to send - four television channels can easily occupy the same spectrum as one analog channel.

If we had used analog technology, using two hour VHS tapes, we would end up using close to 90,000 tapes. But even worse we would end up with a medium that's in-effect redundant - hard to transmit over today's digital networks and impossible to deal with electronically without digitization frame by frame.

The Television Archive Project receives video from many different sources and encodes into the standard MPEG-2 Program Stream format so that video can be replayed using an inexpensive software decoder such as a DVD player application. At a bitrate of 3.275 Mbps per channel, we use around 35GB per day or about 0.7TB for all 20 channels each day. Over a year, we'll archive around 250TB of MPEG-2 video and audio or in other words around 8,000 35GB DLT tapes.

Project Status

Most of the software to run the project has been developed and four channels are currently being archived. At the end of March 2000, we'll be ramping up towards our 20 channel goal.

For technical information related to this project, please follow this link.

Pictures

Click on the thumbnails for full sized images.

	Four DISH Network receivers being used on the initial recording system. The box below the DLT tapes is a Closed Caption to serial conveter. Once the recording systems are running, we'll be upgrading our software to also archive this data for search purposes.
	Inside the Breece Hill Q215 drive. The cartridge holds ten 35GB tapes and there's room for five more behind the catridge.
	The first recording system
	Inside the recording system. The boards at the bottom are the MPEG-2 encoders from FutureTel.