Seven Years of Online Video:
The Internet Archive
Experience
Rick Prelinger
Cardiff, 20 July 2007
A brief timeline
1983-2002: Prelinger Archives engages in licensing
1999: the challenge; research into encoding; big, topheavy project; no scoping
2000: telecine; MPEG-2 encoding; uploading; hammerand-chisel website; 260 objects
2001: Slashdotted; ≈500,000 downloads, 1001 objects
2002: slump in footage sales; first million downloads;
other moving image collections created; first large CC
collection
2003: 1965 objects; switch to digitizing contractor; ≈2
million PA downloads; two-tier system successful
2004: 4 million PA downloads; many other collections up
2005: ≈200,000 video objects; advent of YouTube
2007: staff of 4; ≈270,000 video objects; 7 million PA
downloads; PA sales increase ≈110%; Flash 9
introduced
Major collections
Moving images: 77,887 itemsLive Music Archive: 41,384
concertsAudio: 160,391 recordingsTexts: 229,703
textsOurmedia: 191,386 items (mostly moving images)Web: 85
billion pages
TV: approx. 120 channel/years recorded 24x7x365 by
Television Archive, an independent nonprofit organization
Figures as of 17 July 2007
Subcollections
Animation & Cartoons (951 items)Arts & Music (635
items)Computers & Technology (1,353 items)
Education (1,269 items)Ephemeral Films (282 items)Movies
(2,140 items)News & Public Affairs (5,528 items)Non-English
Videos (159 items)Open Source Movies (49,865
items)Prelinger Archives (1,987 items)Sports Videos (362
items)Video Games (3,498 items)Vlogs (1,840 items)Youth
Media (446 items)
Formats
MPEG-2 (typically 720x480 or 360x480, 2.5-3.5 Mbps)
MPEG-1
MPEG-4 (64 kb)
MPEG-4 (256 kb)
MPEG-4 (“hi-res”)
Flash
RealMedia (256 kb)
RealMedia (64 kb)
QuickTime (various bitrates)
Windows Media (various bitrates)
DV
HD?
Workflow (grossly simplified)
User upload (or IA upload)
Derivation
Curation
Publication
Moderation
Annotation
Reuse
Pluses
Longterm nonprofit presence in highly commercialized
field
Non-revenue (ad-free) model
Massive downloadable offerings
Large Creative Commons-licensed collection
Uncountable derivative works
Supportive of deeplinking
Promise of storage forever
Frugal operation
Stimulated other access projects
Loyal user base and growing body of annotation
Self-formed, relatively small social networks
Many have found ways to use IA for their own purposes
Very DIY
Designed by geeks
Minuses
People deserve downloads, but get confused
Growth has slowed because of YouTube and others
QoS difficult and expensive to maintain
Sustainability untested
Longterm digital preservation strategy only just
emerging
Reactive more than proactive
Understaffed
No affordable solution for digitizing direct from film
No editing tools (Swiss Army Knife)
Segmentation unsupported, though working on it
The portal problem (fan size fits all)
Embryonic community features
Recent growth in downloads of uncertain provenance
Very DIY
Designed by geeks
In less than one year, YouTube built an easy-to-access
online collection (≈12 million videos) that I'd argue has
become the world's default media archives. Everything
anyone does to bring archives online will now be measured
against YouTube's ambiguous legacy. It offers a sense of
completeness: a massive collection of old and new video,
from video of Malcolm X's complete speeches to clips of the
moose I saw wandering in people's front yards in
Anchorage. It sticks to preview mode, presenting visually
degraded Flash video, so users feel no transgression. It’s
being sued right and left, but most rightsholders will rightfully
regard what it does as promotion. Best of all, it allows users
to upload almost anything, annotate with relative freedom
and network with one another.
rick@archive.org