主播大秀

The International Federation of Television Archives, FIAT/IFTA, celebrated 40 years 1977-2017 at the recent Annual World Conference 2017 in Mexico City hosted by the Fonoteca Nacional (Mexican National Sound Archive), TVUNAM (Television Station of the National Autonomous University of Mexico ) and SPR (The Public Broadcasting System of the Mexican State). Despite the aftermath of one of the most devastating earthquakes in 32 years, television production and broadcast archivists from all over the world, demonstrated their solidarity with the hosts and the city to support, share knowledge, expertise and ideas from within our current digital media archive industry. The Anniversary theme 鈥淟iving in the Digital Age: Connecting Roots and Cultures鈥� was also relevant in this city full of audio-visual heritage with deep historic roots and connected cultures dating back centuries and now moving into the digital domain.

FIAT/IFTA is the world鈥檚 leading association for the professional broadcast media audio-visual archiving sector. With over 250 organisational members worldwide its reach and network is exceptional with professional leaders and executives, experts, standards drivers and policy influencers who come together with industry partners and colleagues to create a unique actively engaged and connected community. Its primary focus is to promote the exchange of knowledge, expertise and cooperation for all those engaged in preservation, exploitation and management of the moving image and recorded sound materials and associated metadata. The annual world conference, media management and regional seminars provide a forum for active discussions on various topics with an emphasis on current and future technologies and trends.  The 主播大秀 has been a proactive member from the very beginning to the present day.

This year, we celebrated the 40th Anniversary of FIAT/IFTA with a special conference gala dinner and a video to showcase the 40 years with interviews of surviving founding members, past Presidents and prominent members. Due to my production experience, I was tasked with the role of Executive Producer and Co-Ordinator of the video which involved research, producing questions and guidelines, EDLs and coordinating filming shoots across Europe with the key protagonists in 主播大秀, RAI, SVT, ORF and NISV. It was very much a collaborative effort!

Anne Hanford, Head of 主播大秀 Film and Tape Library in 1975, was also one of the first founding members of FIAT/IFTA. Her 主播大秀 Archive career spanned 1961 -1996 where she developed the television library services into 主播大秀 Information & Archives. Concurrently, she became Vice President of FIAT from June 1977 鈥� August 1982 and President September 1982 -1990 developing the organisation with her dedicated and inspirational professionalism alongside television archive colleagues from across the world. It is with thanks to our founding member鈥檚 vision that FIAT/IFTA has evolved into a key association in the digital media industry.

was shown at the opening reception and the opening ceremony of the Conference.

40th Anniversary Awards

For the 40th Anniversary Gala Dinner in the former XVIII Convent of Betlemitas (Museo Interactivo de Economia), Anne Hanford had travelled the long journey to Mexico City, to be presented with a special honorary award as one of the first founding members of FIAT/IFTA and for her passionate commitment to the development of audio-visual media archives. She was really surprised and delighted to receive this award.

Also, Richard Wright, ex 主播大秀 R&D Engineer, was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award for his long serving preservation work with the series of EU Presto projects which helped to guide and inform the FIAT/IFTA community over the years.

Snippets from the Conference

Brid Dooley, President FIAT/IFTA highlighted the changing business models in television broadcasting, a new age of digital content creation and fragmentation in distribution which is transforming the industry as never before.  We all agreed that FIAT/IFTA needs to engage with the new players in the media industry Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google and Apple in terms of their media management and archives.

There were sessions on 鈥淢edia Asset Management and Metadata Enrichment鈥�, 鈥淢anaging Large Amounts of Data鈥�, which focused on automation and data driven methodologies. RTVE Spanish public service broadcaster presented an interesting case study on their comparative analysis of cloud provider鈥檚 automated generation of descriptive metadata. Etiqmedia, a spin off company from the University of Zaragoza (Spain), have developed automated cataloguing software based on semantic analysis of content, speech to text, face recognition, analysis of keywords and automatically creating a descriptive summary. In Brazil, MediaPortal and University of Sao Pablo have incorporated AI and cloud computing into their software for automatic cataloguing and retrieval which is in prototype testing with media archives. IBM Watson Media (USA) discussed how cognitive technology is enriching metadata and streamlining workflows in the production and archive processes and providing a better user experience to viewers.

Have you heard of the Arctic World Archive, an offline data vault in the arctic of Northern Norway? The National Archive of Mexico and National Archive of Brazil have developed a digital time capsule of their most valuable visual digital assets and documents applying a newly developed technology with PIQL Mexico to deposit the data during the inauguration of the doomsday vault earlier this year.

NHK presented their challenges for preserving UHD content. Last year, NHK began 4K/8K  test broadcasting on satellite channels and it will start regular broadcasting in 2018 with a view to broadcast the Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics in UHD in 2020. The demand for archiving UHD materials and retrieval is increasing as 4K/8K programme production is rapidly growing. NHK Archives are building a trial online archival system for UHD to assess the many challenges. The storage capacity of 8K video is phenomenal so it is compressed to a 2K copy for search and preview. Although LTO 6 tapes are used as back up, they found that operationally this is a very slow process. In 2025 NHK will move to a new broadcasting centre and are developing a business continuity plan to duplicate the data on cloud storage. So they are trialling a testbed of 鈥渆verything in the cloud鈥� to test scalability, reliability, migration and operational costs.

Presentations from the World Conference will be uploaded to the FIAT/IFTA website in due course. In addition, you can .