120,000 cassettes: SRF digitizes television archive since 1953
As part of the national BetaSuisse project, Swiss Radio and Television has successfully digitized more than 120,000 videotapes containing television broadcasts spanning over 55 years of television history.
The digitized stock includes current programs such as "Tagesschau," "Rundschau" and "Kassensturz," as well as earlier cult programs such as "Teleboy" and "Antenne. With the consistent digitization of the archive stock, SRF is committed to the long-term preservation and reprocessing of Switzerland's audiovisual cultural heritage.
In January, the Documentation and Archives division of Swiss Radio and Television successfully completed the BetaSuisse national digitization project. For this purpose, over 120,000 Beta videocassettes have been extensively digitized over the past ten years, which SRF used from 1989 to 2012 to archive its most popular in-house productions. The digitized stock also includes a large part of the stock archived on film reels since 1953, which means that more than 55 years of Swiss television history are available in digital form. The digitization work, launched in 2007, was carried out in collaboration with Radiotelevisione svizzera (RSI) and Memoriav, the association for the preservation of audiovisual cultural assets.
BetaSuisse's digitized stock includes current programs such as "Tagesschau," "Rundschau," "Kassensturz" and "Schweiz aktuell," as well as earlier cult programs such as "Freitagsmagazin," "Antenne," "Viktor's Late Program" and "Teleboy. The digitized broadcasts are available to SRF's editorial teams for reuse in their own programming. At the same time, part of this extensive archive stock is made available to the general public on Play SRF. The offering is constantly being expanded and improved.
Division Manager Christian Vogg on the successful conclusion of the BetaSuisse project: "With the digitization of the SRF archive holdings, we are making an important contribution to the preservation of Switzerland's audiovisual cultural heritage. In this respect, we see the successful conclusion of BetaSuisse as a milestone for the beginning opening of our archive. Now we are taking care of other archive treasures, which we would also like to make accessible to our audience in the coming months and years."
Swiss Radio and Television has been committed to collecting, preserving and reprocessing audiovisual cultural assets for many years. SRF's archive includes several hundred thousand hours of programming from more than 80 years of radio and television history. The culturally valuable content from Switzerland, about Switzerland and about everything that interests Switzerland is continuously archived and made available to the general public.
