FIAT/IFTA World Conference 2025

The Value, Use and Copyright Commission of FIAT/IFTA would like to present the recent year’s work researching the impact of generative AI on the audiovisual archiving sector. GenAI impacts the authenticity, integrity, and future accessibility of archival content, and the goal was to write a paper with insights from broadcasting archives who already implemented GenAI. The paper presents guidelines on these aspects:

• Allowing archives to be used for GenAI training – What are the implications, rights, and permissions?
• Handling GenAI-generated content – Addressing authenticity, ownership, and copyright challenges.

The presentation is built upon the groundwork laid in my previous year's talk. In 2024, I presented the initial phase of my doctorate’s thesis, which explored the migration of audiovisual documents to the cloud, using Rede Globo of Brazil as a specific case study. This current presentation turns its attention to the second part of my research: the environmental ramifications of choosing cloud infrastructure.

Drawing upon the insights of Bindhu and Vijesh (2019) in their work on mitigating the environmental impact of cloud technologies, the concern regarding the ecological cost of computing initially focused on diminishing energy consumption. However, contemporary understanding - shaped by technological progress - emphasizes the efficient utilization of computers and associated technologies while prioritizing environmental stewardship. The adoption of virtual computers and the transition towards Nano Data Centers should yield an energy expenditure reduction of up to 30% when compared to traditional data center models.

The increasing global environmental consciousness, coupled with more stringent regulatory frameworks and the potential for significant cost savings, has spurred considerable efforts to minimize the ecological footprint of the entire information technology ecosystem vital for modern business operations. Cloud computing has emerged as a compelling solution to these aspirations, giving rise to the concept of 'green clouding'. However, it's important to acknowledge that the energy consumption associated with machine learning processes, the development, and the application of artificial intelligence can be considerable. To investigate this topic in a practical context, I will once again analyze the case of Rede Globo, specifically through the lens of their ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) reports, alongside those of Google Cloud, the cloud platform utilized by Globo.

Northern Ireland Screen is part of the UTV Archive Partnership alongside UTV and the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, with PRONI storing much of the physical film and tape. Northern Ireland Screen is responsible for the digitisation, curation, hosting, education and creative repurposing of this archive. In 2024 UTV approached us to use our knowledge of their archive to create a six-part TV series. We said, “Yes, please!”

My own background is as an archivist on many television series for BBC Northern Ireland as well as a director of my own feature documentaries. My colleague, Paul McClintock, worked for many years as an editor on a variety of TV shows. Within the archive team of Northern Ireland Screen we had the experience necessary to take the archive and create something new out of it for a modern television audience.

My talk will be about how we went about this process of deciding what the series would be about and what time period to focus on, based upon what would tell the best story of social history and entertainment, combined with it being a period represented by heavily digitised parts of the archive. Of course, for most of UTV’s early history Northern Ireland’s narrative is contentious and the archives represent a divided and violent society. We decided we would bypass the troubled period in history and go back to the start of UTV in October 1959 to tell the story of the 1960s – a time before the violence.

Blending the moving images carefully with the music of the period to create a nostalgic experience, history and entertainment come together. With clips and imagery in the talk, we will tell the story of how a national archive can be repurposed for broadcast again to teach an audience about a more shared past they have forgotten about against a backdrop of all the social change of the 1960s. And, of course, The Beatles and The Rolling Stones drop by as part of the journey.

This is archive truly valorised to live again.

The research team in DR Archive has for 10 years worked to change the workflow of producing new programs with archive content. From being in the end of the production chain, the archive team has moved to the beginning of the production chain. This has resulted in better use of the archive, better focus on rights, and a much higher awareness of the archive content as a big asset for the corporation. I would like to explain the new and better workflow from archive to production exemplified by DR’s 100 years anniversary. The archive was consulted way before the editorials started their program workflows, and this very early visibility of the archive team has resulted in many new programs with archive content not only from the surface of the archive, but from all corners of the archive with experts digging to find the very best materials for each production.

In 2019 the BFI launched the Young Audiences Content Fund (YACF), a government sponsored lottery fund which was designed to support programming for children and young audiences against a backdrop of declining industry output in this area. The Fund would go on to award over £40m to 221 projects developed for free-to-access platforms, including UK broadcasters, with specific goals including diversity, innovation and representation of the UK’s nations and regions. Though the Fund closed in 2022, it had resounding successes with award winning programmes including Big Boys (2022-2025), Sol (2020) and Milo (2021).

From the outset, the BFI National Archive worked with the YACF to preserve all the completed programmes that were supported by the Fund, lead to a remarkable collection of over 1000 titles. This presentation will explore the significance of this funding initiative and the cultural significance of the collection. We will set out the challenges in developing preservation workflows that aligned with programme delivery from commissioning to broadcast and outline how expectations changed over the course of the Fund. We will also discuss the ways in which the fund and BFI National Archive attempted to embed Equity, Diversity & Inclusion principles into the preservation workflows – with varying degrees of success.

The presentation will conclude with a look at our open source approach to archiving innovative Ultra Access interactive programming for the final series from the fund - Mixmups (2023) - and how this might inform future collecting plans.