"NBC News Launches New Archive Site"
NBC News is formally launching a new website, NBCUniversalArchives.com, that will allow customers to buy archive material from a number of divisions across NBCUniversal’s businesses, including NBC News, NBC Sports, NBC Entertainment, Universal Studios, Universal Pictures, Telemundo, The Weather Channel, NBC Radio, NBC Photobank and others.
The effort is notable both because of its size-the site includes over 40,000 clips and provides clients with the ability to search through records for over 1 million bits of content-and because few other major media companies have attempted to centralize the process of selling their archives from a number of different divisions on one website.
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NBC News has been working with Thought Equity Motion, a provider of stock footage and digital technologies, for some time on digitizing and archiving its content. Thought Equity remains the key technological partner for the new website.
“They are providing the Web servers, the application servers, the Linux open source operating system,” Fabiano says. “They have a very extensive and robust file tape system that stores all the content that we have on the site. That allows it to be accessible dynamically in real time so that when you place an order for a clip, that order is sent to a data center in the middle of Wyoming. A robotic arm goes and finds the long-form asset where that clip is and pulls the tape. It ingests it into the format you request in your online e-commerce order and then delivers it to you within one minute, posting it to your account so you can download it.”
NBC has also integrated its digital asset management system from Ardendo into the Thought Equity system. That allows additional clips to be created from the many longer-form assets that have been digitized; those can then be posted to the website quickly, usually within 15 minutes.
Filed under: Archives and Special Collections, Data Files, Management and Leadership, News
About Gary Price
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area. He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit. Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.
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