Prasar Bharati will have rare tapes digitized
Prasar Bharati, a known public broadcasting company, went to IIT-Delhi and offered to help them digitalize their archived video and audio tapes. A lot of these archived tapes include many notable speeches from famous Indian freedom fighters. Numerous agencies have already tried to do this before and each one of them failed. This task was started years ago and now Prasar Bharati is going to take over.
Get Dimple Sachdeva’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Some of the most notable tapes in the archives include speeches from Mahatma Gandhi, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, and Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel. Some other playback machines and analogue records were recovered, but they were not able to be played or viewed in any way. This was due to the poor condition of the tapes since they were not properly maintained throughout all these years as stated in The New Indian Express. Preserving the speeches of India’s most prominent leaders of history is important to the country.
Prasar Bharati actually started the digitalization process about 4 years ago, but the progress has been slow. With the Doordarshan archives alone, their analogue records have almost 150,000 hours on U-matic tapes and their Beta tapes have roughly 200,000 hours. Other content that needs to be digitalized includes up to 15,000 hours of All India Radio programming content on LP discs and tapes. In Delhi, the Central Archives has roughly 20,000 hours of All India Radio programming content on compact discs.
Prasar Bharati is hoping to do what the British Broadcasting Corporation did by digitalized archived content and then selling it for big money. The BBC generated over €400 million over the last few years from doing this. Now that IIT-Delhi wants Prasar Bharati’s help in digitalizing their content, this could mean a big business opportunity for the Prasar. They might not make as much money as the BBC did from doing this, but they should make a lot if they can speed up the digitalization process of these classic archives.
