Ooyala, a leader in content supply chain solutions, is proud to announce it has been selected by the British Film Institute (BFI) to assist in the BFI’s massive Heritage 2022 project to transcode and aggregate access to its ever growing digital archive of moving image assets.
The BFI is the leading organization for film in the UK and curates and presents international public showings of world cinema for audiences in theaters, at festivals and online. The BFI National Archive is one of the world’s largest and most important collections of film and television. As part of its work, the ambitious Heritage 2022 program is a key component to ensure that everyone, everywhere in the UK will be able to enjoy more of the UK’s moving image heritage. Heritage 2022 is a preservation-led program to safeguard high risk significant collections held by the BFI National Archive and the Regional and National Film Archives across the UK. It ensures such collections are safe for future generations to enjoy and gain knowledge from, and enables access as a result of digital preservation.
For the ambitious task, the BFI will use the Ooyala Flex Media Platform, an open and extensible video management solution that simplifies and streamlines the entire content supply chain, from production to profit, significantly reducing costs and complexity while increasing revenue. It seamlessly integrates with legacy solutions and is used by many of the world’s leading organizations offering entertainment, news and sports content, such as HBO, Turner and Arsenal Football Club. It will be implemented alongside BFI’s existing systems, providing broader functionality and orchestration of BFI’s distribution workflows and ensuring greater compatibility with any additional systems and applications.
“We have a critical opportunity to save irreplaceable titles -- stories that make up the fabric of British filmic history – that are stored on at-risk videotape formats and film,” said Edward Humphrey, Director of Digital at the British Film Institute. “We have set this as a five-year task because there are a finite number of compatible video playback machines and spare parts in working condition, and a looming decrease in engineering and preservation talent. The clock is ticking, and we are counting on Ooyala to help us manage access to this vital content.”
“BFI has set for itself the ambitious and crucially important task of preserving Britain’s wonderful motion image heritage for future generations,” said Jonathan Huberman, CEO, Ooyala. “With the Ooyala Flex Media Platform, BFI will be able to do so efficiently. We feel privileged to be able to play a role in helping BFI and legions of dedicated preservationists and other craftspeople to bring to new audiences so many treasures of British film.”
