Report: “New Zealand’s Television History Archive Under Threat”

From Radio New Zealand:

The country’s core project to save its television history, such as old episodes of Country Calendar, has put just a handful of titles online compared to the 20,000 the public was promised three years ago.
Ngā Taonga [New Zealand’s Audiovisual Archive] now admits it did not understand how big a job it was taking it on, it did not have the right equipment to do it and had not – and still has not – sorted out the copyright issues with TVNZ in order to get footage online.
The then broadcasting minister Craig Foss has told RNZ he could not recall a government promise to digitise 20,000 titles by 2017.
In addition, the Ngā Taonga Sound and Vision trust has digitised just 2000 titles.
Its agreement with the government lapsed in July and has been rolled over to next year, but it still has no new targets.
Yet it faces a mountain of 200,000 old TV tapes that are at risk of being lost forever, and is millions of dollars short to do the work.

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