Websites show archive treasure of Valais local television
3,300 hours of programming from the Valais local television station Kanal 9 have been preserved for posterity. As part of a pilot project, nearly 3,000 programs from 1984 to 2005 were digitized and made available online.
Channel 9 was founded in 1984 and has always backed up its productions. From 1984 to 2005, the broadcasts were archived on tapes. Since September 2005, the production has been informatized, and since 2013, the production and broadcasting of the programs have been in HD. In order for the entire corpus to be secured, the obsolete technology of the analog recordings from 1984 to 2005 required immediate measures. The digitization proved to be necessary, as well as the indexing, which facilitates public access.
A pilot project of national scale and novel technology
The first phase of the project focused on the video archives from 1984 to 2005 - over 7000 cassettes. An agreement signed at the end of 2014 between Kanal 9 and Mediathek Wallis formed the formal basis for the launch of the joint project. The use of innovative Speech-to-Text technology for automatic speech recognition enabled the optimal realization of this project. The technical and financial support of the specialists from Memoriav and OFCOM, as well as the involvement of the State Archives in the field of electronic data archiving, were decisive.
An audiovisual treasure for all
So far, about 3000 broadcasts have been digitized. A website has been set up for the Canal 9 archive. 3300 hours of broadcasts, unique visual testimonies of current Valais history, are currently available to the public on the websites of Mediathek Valais and Canal 9/Kanal 9.
