HUGE archives of on-line text, radio, and television news will be instantly available to over 9000 journalists when the BBC begins to install the world鈥檚 largest multimedia network next year.
The corporation is publishing a document this week inviting computer and television equipment companies to bid for the contract to overhaul its newsroom computer systems. The project is expected to cost around 拢30 million.
The network will give journalists access to news wire services and 90 days worth of BBC radio and TV archives, as well as allowing them to carry out complex tasks such as editing and scheduling from their desktop computers.
Advertisement
鈥淭his will affect thousands of BBC employees, but not necessarily make them redundant,鈥� says Roger Bolton, the general secretary of the union representing technical staff at the BBC. 鈥淭here will be a serious need for training and new career paths over the next couple of years,鈥� he says.
Until now, the BBC has run its archiving and library services as a separate division called BBC News Resources, which sells material back to News and Current Affairs.
When reporters need archive footage, News Resources provides a selection of clips, sending them by a variety of means ranging from motorbike to satellite, depending on how far away the particular newsroom is. The journalists choose the footage they want, book time in an editing suite, and 鈥渃ut鈥� a report together. The report then goes to a news editor for approval and scheduling, before ending up in the transmission room ready for broadcast.
With the new system, footage will be digitised and stored on the news rooms鈥� computer servers when it arrives after filming. The journalists can call up the footage, which will be displayed using the Quicktime Video standard, which is commonly used to pass video around the Internet.
Using cut and paste techniques common in wordprocessing, the journalists can create a rough cut of the report. The software will then create a list of cutting instructions, which is transferred to the server where the rough cut is automatically turned from Quicktime Video into broadcast quality footage. The final report is held in the server鈥檚 news 鈥渂asket鈥�, approved and scheduled by a news editor from their own desktop computer and broadcast automatically.
鈥淲e have evaluated most of the newsroom systems on the market but not found any that fulfil our requirements, so we have designed our own architecture,鈥� says Mel Martin, the BBC鈥檚 director of electronic news production.
鈥淭he technology is changing so fast that from the time the equipment is bought to the time it is installed it is out of date. So every component of the system can be independently upgraded,鈥� he says.
The new network will be phased in over the next couple of years. The first stage will be to install large-scale databases to store text. These will later be upgraded to cope with video.
Independent news broadcasters in Britain and around Europe are believed to be contemplating similar changes.
