13 ms·

"Erase and rewind": Thoughts on the BBC's plans to delete 172 websites

94 points by spxdcz 16y ago

gaius 16y ago
To be fair, the British Broadcasting Corporation ought to have been a lot clearer about its remit in the past. Take Dirac for example, why was the British taxpayer funding that development work when H.264 was already widely supported? It's no wonder now that they are being required to make cuts, they had become a huge sprawling monster with a finger in every pie, no matter how relevant.
- NickPollard 16y ago
  Are you implying that a Broadcasting Corporation ought not to be concerned with technologies for transmitting video over communication networks?
  - gaius 16y ago
    Concerned with? Sure. NIH on the taxpayer's money? Probably not. Not like the BBC ever had its own homegrown tape format or anything, it got it all off-the-shelf.
    - NickPollard 16y ago
      You could argue that tapes are not broadcasting though - whereas if I recall, the BBC was quite involved with early Television research and development. Personally, as a British citizen and license-payer, I'm quite happy for the BBC to spend money on research and development (if well-thought and efficient; perhaps in this case it was misplaced), and I'm glad that the BBC is pushing technologies like video-over-internet compared to some of the more dinosaur-like traditional media companies. Time to go watch some more BBC4 streaming over IP.
    - rodh 16y ago
      Maybe not a homegrown tape format... but how about Teletext, FM Radio, Freeview, HD on Freeview, iPlayer?
      - gaius 16y ago
        The BBC invented FM? I was not aware of that...
- bruceboughton 16y ago
  Your point about Dirac is entirely irrelevant to the OP, which was about the Beeb embarking on a spree of wilful destruction of content. All big organisation have areas of waste but content is the BBC's raison d'être, not something that should be discarded to save money.
  - gaius 16y ago
    They aren't destroying it just for the hell of it; BBC Online has been cut across the board because they were so wasteful in the past.
    - sambeau 16y ago
      Wasteful? I'm an ex BBC Online employee. Most people don't realise quite how few people are involved in the creation and update of the BBC website. When I was there it was generally 2 people per site (and each person was on more than one site). We had a dozen staff looking after a hundred sites using old and borrowed tech and the occasional independent flash developer. The BBC was never wasteful. Don't believe what you read in the anti-BBC press. They have their own agenda.
      - imajes 16y ago
        BBC FM&T and R&D did/does awesome stuff with little resources. It appears to outsiders-who-care that the problem exists higher up, especially with decisions such as adopting Siemens to provide infrastructure support (Talk about locking in what existed 10 years ago with an SLA!), and the perverted influence of people like Highfield and now, surprisingly, Huggers.
    - bruceboughton 16y ago
      To borrow a phrase, since this government came into power, people seem to know the waste of everything and the value of nothing.
  - sfphotoarts 16y ago
    I don't believe this was OT, the poster made it clear how it related to the article; that the BBC has an obligation to their funders (the British taxpayers.)
- eftpotrm 16y ago
  The BBC's mission is to broadcast content. Clearly that future is digital content, I'd argue equally clearly that future is in Internet-style streamed distribution over CDNs rather than in classical broadcasting. This puts the BBC as having a major interest in both optimal storage and transmission of streamed media. Why on earth is it not in the BBC's interest to investigate means of improving its service offering and lowering its cost base through use of improved video storage and transmission technology? To get back to the original point as that's about maintenance of existing content, I agree 100% with those who are saying this is purely political. We have a strong strand in our commercial media which will push relentlessly for the BBC to be cut on all possible fronts because it's impinging on their ability to profit. I'm sorry, but that's rubbish. I watch more BBC than commercial content (and have done for many years) because it's better. You don't have to go very far back in history for the ITV franchise operators to have been lumbering behemoths viewed as a license to print money. The merged ITV that came out of Carlton and Granada was hardly a weak, minor player, nor is the RTL Group backed 5 family or the News Corporation backed Sky network. All are quite capable of building a serious, large-scale rival to the BBC, but they seem to dismiss it as too expensive compared to running repeats of imported clipshows. What the BBC is doing here is absolutely wrong, but they're doing it in response to (government-favoured) self-serving political pressure from their commercial rivals and out of largely reasonable fear that if they aren't seen to do something like this themselves something worse will be forced on them. That is the core problem - excessive political attention being paid to low-quality competitors who think they have a right to the extra profit they'd have if the BBC didn't exist. They don't; I gladly pay a comparable amount for the BBC as for Sky's vastly lower quality subscription offering and the commercial media outlets need to realise this and raise their game.
Tycho 16y ago
They could probably keep them running for the price of some football pundit's yearly salary.
- pbhjpbhj 16y ago
  They could release on a free document license or CC-BY or similar and the content would appear on hundreds of websites. Indeed as the idea is money-saving and efficiencies they should archive the lot (about half a days wages, at first, and maybe a single HDD) and then sell of the domains at auction lock-stock - deleting them is silly whilst they have any value at all. They could give the domains to me I'll maintain them.
  - notahacker 16y ago
    I'm extremely tempted to perform a Reocities style rescue job and handle the takedown notices as and when they come. Might not work for some of the interactive stuff but at least the text can be saved.
    - imajes 16y ago
      Already started. Email me if you want to help (in my profile).
      - pbhjpbhj 16y ago
        You realise of course that this is unlawful copyright infringement?
        imajes 16y ago
        Sure. but the goal is to get an archive of it first, we can deal with putting it online at the right moment.
        msg 16y ago
        When you're on your deathbed, you're not going to tell your grandchildren "I sure wish I had upheld the strict letter of copyright law on the internet more." But you might say "remember that time I saved the BBC from itself?" And like Big Fish, it will be almost true.
sambeau 16y ago
The deletion of the sites is purely political. The BBC needs to make visible cuts in places where the British (anti-BBC) press accuse them of providing services that they believe should be provided by private companies. If the site doesn't vanish the press wouldn't see it as a real cut, would they?
tobylane 16y ago
It's not about holding the information, it's about serving it. The BBC makes a whole lot of websites, for when they mention stuff in dramas (Think Bad Wolf in first series of Doctor Who). They will hold all the information they ever made, offline, just like all the TV they can keep, they do. What they should do is make sure the Internet Archive has it all. And then stop hosting it, stop paying for the domains. These websites are only mentioned in dramas, they are pretty much useless after a few weeks. If you're watching first series Dr Who and want to see the sites, you can live with using the Internet Archive (Wayback machine).
- pbhjpbhj 16y ago
  >These websites are only mentioned in dramas, they are pretty much useless after a few weeks. They're worth at least a little more than their domain names and content costs by virtue of them being SEO bait. "Bad Wolf" could be a good company [trading] name or band name if you could buy out the top spot in the listings from the BBC.
Semiapies 16y ago
Hmm. Some of these sites look like genuine losses, but most are just promo sites for BBC series, at least some of which have been cancelled for years (and some of those looked to have only lasted a few episodes). I think fairly few of these deletions can really be compared to erasing and re-using the master tapes for those shows. I'm ambivalent. I'm generally pro-preservation, even of ephemera, but I feel rather worse for the people getting the axe than, say, the sunsetting of the pages promoting the Concert for Diana. (After all, do we gain anything more than mild amusement that http://goo.gl/sd4xD http://goo.gl/sd4xD is still up after ~15 years?) As for the worthier sites, it looks like people should take it up with the BBC that those sites are vanishing while BBC promo fluff like http://www.badwolf.org.uk http://www.badwolf.org.uk (warning: may still have sound) isn't on the list, yet.
- chc 16y ago
  Actually, I do think there's something to be gained by keeping the Space Jam site up. Just look at it: That's what a professionally made website looked like back then! I still remember the day, but I think for the fast-approaching generation of designers who were born after that site (remember, this year's Web Design 101 students were born in 1993), it will be an interesting history lesson with some insight into how the Web evolved.
  - Semiapies 16y ago
    Fair point, though aren't archival services better for that sort of thing than hoping nobody at Warner says, "I don't think we need to keep the Space Jam site after the next upgrade." or "Make that a redirect to http://www2.warnerbros.com/spacejam http://www2.warnerbros.com/spacejam " (or some future updated page for the site)?
- mechanical_fish 16y ago
  To me, this is what separates those of us with the souls of librarians from others. Sure, the sites may be fluff. But they are someone's work. Promo designers are people too. They have mothers. It's the trivial bits of history that you end up missing the most. And I might not be making this argument if we were talking about an old building taking up valuable space in a city, or even a shelf of books taking up space in my city library. It's a bunch of websites. Unlikely that the lot of them add up to a whole terabyte. Spend three hundred bucks on backup drives and twenty bucks a month on a Dreamhost account. [1] --- [1] Sorry that I can't reliably translate "twenty bucks worth of hosting" into equivalent UK units. ;)
unreal37 16y ago
When things are no longer relevant, I have no problem with them going away. If it means a lot to you, make yourself a personal copy. Humans often have a hoarding instinct, and it's hard to shake that temptation. How many of us keep every email ever sent to us over the last 10 years? How many of us have 1TB of personal storage on our PCs. and we're running out of space? How many of us have the phone bill from 5 years ago filed neatly away in some box? Let some stuff go.
- pbhjpbhj 16y ago
  >How many of us have the phone bill from 5 years ago filed neatly away in some box? Let some stuff go. 5 years is, IIRC, the term for keeping records for tax purposes where I am .. worth checking before discarding all your old records.
ck2 16y ago
Put it on a $100 2TB hard drive and give it to Google or the WayBackMachine.
- gwern 16y ago
  $100? I'd rather pay $72: http://forre.st/storage#sata http://forre.st/storage#sata
joeyh 16y ago
The WW2 People's War site that this article highlighted as particularly bad to lose has in fact already been archived by the British Library: http://www.webarchive.org.uk/ukwa/target/114827/source/search http://www.webarchive.org.uk/ukwa/target/114827/source/searc...

94 points by spxdcz 16y ago

gaius 16y ago

To be fair, the British Broadcasting Corporation ought to have been a lot clearer about its remit in the past. Take Dirac for example, why was the British taxpayer funding that development work when H.264 was already widely supported? It's no wonder now that they are being required to make cuts, they had become a huge sprawling monster with a finger in every pie, no matter how relevant.

NickPollard 16y ago
Are you implying that a Broadcasting Corporation ought not to be concerned with technologies for transmitting video over communication networks?
- gaius 16y ago
  Concerned with? Sure. NIH on the taxpayer's money? Probably not. Not like the BBC ever had its own homegrown tape format or anything, it got it all off-the-shelf.
  - NickPollard 16y ago
    You could argue that tapes are not broadcasting though - whereas if I recall, the BBC was quite involved with early Television research and development. Personally, as a British citizen and license-payer, I'm quite happy for the BBC to spend money on research and development (if well-thought and efficient; perhaps in this case it was misplaced), and I'm glad that the BBC is pushing technologies like video-over-internet compared to some of the more dinosaur-like traditional media companies. Time to go watch some more BBC4 streaming over IP.
  - rodh 16y ago
    Maybe not a homegrown tape format... but how about Teletext, FM Radio, Freeview, HD on Freeview, iPlayer?
    - gaius 16y ago
      The BBC invented FM? I was not aware of that...
bruceboughton 16y ago
Your point about Dirac is entirely irrelevant to the OP, which was about the Beeb embarking on a spree of wilful destruction of content. All big organisation have areas of waste but content is the BBC's raison d'être, not something that should be discarded to save money.
- gaius 16y ago
  They aren't destroying it just for the hell of it; BBC Online has been cut across the board because they were so wasteful in the past.
  - sambeau 16y ago
    Wasteful? I'm an ex BBC Online employee. Most people don't realise quite how few people are involved in the creation and update of the BBC website. When I was there it was generally 2 people per site (and each person was on more than one site). We had a dozen staff looking after a hundred sites using old and borrowed tech and the occasional independent flash developer. The BBC was never wasteful. Don't believe what you read in the anti-BBC press. They have their own agenda.
    - imajes 16y ago
      BBC FM&T and R&D did/does awesome stuff with little resources. It appears to outsiders-who-care that the problem exists higher up, especially with decisions such as adopting Siemens to provide infrastructure support (Talk about locking in what existed 10 years ago with an SLA!), and the perverted influence of people like Highfield and now, surprisingly, Huggers.
  - bruceboughton 16y ago
    To borrow a phrase, since this government came into power, people seem to know the waste of everything and the value of nothing.
- sfphotoarts 16y ago
  I don't believe this was OT, the poster made it clear how it related to the article; that the BBC has an obligation to their funders (the British taxpayers.)
eftpotrm 16y ago
The BBC's mission is to broadcast content. Clearly that future is digital content, I'd argue equally clearly that future is in Internet-style streamed distribution over CDNs rather than in classical broadcasting. This puts the BBC as having a major interest in both optimal storage and transmission of streamed media. Why on earth is it not in the BBC's interest to investigate means of improving its service offering and lowering its cost base through use of improved video storage and transmission technology? To get back to the original point as that's about maintenance of existing content, I agree 100% with those who are saying this is purely political. We have a strong strand in our commercial media which will push relentlessly for the BBC to be cut on all possible fronts because it's impinging on their ability to profit. I'm sorry, but that's rubbish. I watch more BBC than commercial content (and have done for many years) because it's better. You don't have to go very far back in history for the ITV franchise operators to have been lumbering behemoths viewed as a license to print money. The merged ITV that came out of Carlton and Granada was hardly a weak, minor player, nor is the RTL Group backed 5 family or the News Corporation backed Sky network. All are quite capable of building a serious, large-scale rival to the BBC, but they seem to dismiss it as too expensive compared to running repeats of imported clipshows. What the BBC is doing here is absolutely wrong, but they're doing it in response to (government-favoured) self-serving political pressure from their commercial rivals and out of largely reasonable fear that if they aren't seen to do something like this themselves something worse will be forced on them. That is the core problem - excessive political attention being paid to low-quality competitors who think they have a right to the extra profit they'd have if the BBC didn't exist. They don't; I gladly pay a comparable amount for the BBC as for Sky's vastly lower quality subscription offering and the commercial media outlets need to realise this and raise their game.

Tycho 16y ago

They could probably keep them running for the price of some football pundit's yearly salary.

pbhjpbhj 16y ago
They could release on a free document license or CC-BY or similar and the content would appear on hundreds of websites. Indeed as the idea is money-saving and efficiencies they should archive the lot (about half a days wages, at first, and maybe a single HDD) and then sell of the domains at auction lock-stock - deleting them is silly whilst they have any value at all. They could give the domains to me I'll maintain them.
- notahacker 16y ago
  I'm extremely tempted to perform a Reocities style rescue job and handle the takedown notices as and when they come. Might not work for some of the interactive stuff but at least the text can be saved.
  - imajes 16y ago
    Already started. Email me if you want to help (in my profile).
    - pbhjpbhj 16y ago
      You realise of course that this is unlawful copyright infringement?
      - imajes 16y ago
        Sure. but the goal is to get an archive of it first, we can deal with putting it online at the right moment.
      - msg 16y ago
        When you're on your deathbed, you're not going to tell your grandchildren "I sure wish I had upheld the strict letter of copyright law on the internet more." But you might say "remember that time I saved the BBC from itself?" And like Big Fish, it will be almost true.

sambeau 16y ago

The deletion of the sites is purely political. The BBC needs to make visible cuts in places where the British (anti-BBC) press accuse them of providing services that they believe should be provided by private companies. If the site doesn't vanish the press wouldn't see it as a real cut, would they?

tobylane 16y ago

It's not about holding the information, it's about serving it. The BBC makes a whole lot of websites, for when they mention stuff in dramas (Think Bad Wolf in first series of Doctor Who). They will hold all the information they ever made, offline, just like all the TV they can keep, they do. What they should do is make sure the Internet Archive has it all. And then stop hosting it, stop paying for the domains. These websites are only mentioned in dramas, they are pretty much useless after a few weeks. If you're watching first series Dr Who and want to see the sites, you can live with using the Internet Archive (Wayback machine).

pbhjpbhj 16y ago
>These websites are only mentioned in dramas, they are pretty much useless after a few weeks. They're worth at least a little more than their domain names and content costs by virtue of them being SEO bait. "Bad Wolf" could be a good company [trading] name or band name if you could buy out the top spot in the listings from the BBC.

Semiapies 16y ago

Hmm. Some of these sites look like genuine losses, but most are just promo sites for BBC series, at least some of which have been cancelled for years (and some of those looked to have only lasted a few episodes). I think fairly few of these deletions can really be compared to erasing and re-using the master tapes for those shows. I'm ambivalent. I'm generally pro-preservation, even of ephemera, but I feel rather worse for the people getting the axe than, say, the sunsetting of the pages promoting the Concert for Diana. (After all, do we gain anything more than mild amusement that http://goo.gl/sd4xD http://goo.gl/sd4xD is still up after ~15 years?) As for the worthier sites, it looks like people should take it up with the BBC that those sites are vanishing while BBC promo fluff like http://www.badwolf.org.uk http://www.badwolf.org.uk (warning: may still have sound) isn't on the list, yet.

chc 16y ago
Actually, I do think there's something to be gained by keeping the Space Jam site up. Just look at it: That's what a professionally made website looked like back then! I still remember the day, but I think for the fast-approaching generation of designers who were born after that site (remember, this year's Web Design 101 students were born in 1993), it will be an interesting history lesson with some insight into how the Web evolved.
- Semiapies 16y ago
  Fair point, though aren't archival services better for that sort of thing than hoping nobody at Warner says, "I don't think we need to keep the Space Jam site after the next upgrade." or "Make that a redirect to http://www2.warnerbros.com/spacejam http://www2.warnerbros.com/spacejam " (or some future updated page for the site)?
mechanical_fish 16y ago
To me, this is what separates those of us with the souls of librarians from others. Sure, the sites may be fluff. But they are someone's work. Promo designers are people too. They have mothers. It's the trivial bits of history that you end up missing the most. And I might not be making this argument if we were talking about an old building taking up valuable space in a city, or even a shelf of books taking up space in my city library. It's a bunch of websites. Unlikely that the lot of them add up to a whole terabyte. Spend three hundred bucks on backup drives and twenty bucks a month on a Dreamhost account. [1] --- [1] Sorry that I can't reliably translate "twenty bucks worth of hosting" into equivalent UK units. ;)

unreal37 16y ago

When things are no longer relevant, I have no problem with them going away. If it means a lot to you, make yourself a personal copy. Humans often have a hoarding instinct, and it's hard to shake that temptation. How many of us keep every email ever sent to us over the last 10 years? How many of us have 1TB of personal storage on our PCs. and we're running out of space? How many of us have the phone bill from 5 years ago filed neatly away in some box? Let some stuff go.

pbhjpbhj 16y ago
>How many of us have the phone bill from 5 years ago filed neatly away in some box? Let some stuff go. 5 years is, IIRC, the term for keeping records for tax purposes where I am .. worth checking before discarding all your old records.

ck2 16y ago

Put it on a $100 2TB hard drive and give it to Google or the WayBackMachine.

gwern 16y ago
$100? I'd rather pay $72: http://forre.st/storage#sata http://forre.st/storage#sata

joeyh 16y ago

The WW2 People's War site that this article highlighted as particularly bad to lose has in fact already been archived by the British Library: http://www.webarchive.org.uk/ukwa/target/114827/source/search http://www.webarchive.org.uk/ukwa/target/114827/source/searc...