Northfield-based Media Recall, the people who made Ch. 11’s archives available online, have signed another PBS station, KAET, Ch. 8 in Phoenix, to digitize much of archives for convenient stock footage purchase on the web.
At the same time, Media Recall is creating a mega-portal of PBS archives?including those of WTTW and KAET?that will that be searchable at the end of the first quarter of 2006.
“The technology is here to open up decades of public television archives and bring the stations much needed revenue,” said MediaRecall CEO Robin Rutledge, a former film company owner.
MediaRecall will scan, digitize, and index KAET’s video archives of about 500 hours to start, although the station’s library is considerably bigger than that. It will then design and launch a dedicated e-commerce web site so users can review the archives and download low-resolution watermarked files free of charge.
