Fuel for a creative nation

The Creative Archive is a BBC led initiative to provide access to public service audio and video archives in a way that allows the British public to find, share, watch, listen and re-use the archive as a fuel for their own creative endeavours. In other words, you can rip, mix and share the BBC.

How?

The Creative Archive is a product of this exciting era of digital media and the internet. It's possible because of innovations in technology and content licensing, along with editorial vision. However, it remains a challenging and complex project with many unknowns. To help us understand the best way to deliver the Creative Archive, we have decided to start with a pilot project.

Pilot

The pilot is designed to introduce and test the concept behind the Creative Archive with you: the audience, the market place and policy makers.

The concept testing breaks into:

1. Audience interest
a. genre interests - the pilot provides us with the opportunity to ask you for feedback on the genres that you are most interested in. This in turn helps us understand how to prioritise digitisation and rights clearance throughout the pilot and beyond.
b. format interests - through experimentation with different formats we can find out which are best for different audience needs.
c. audience outputs - the pilot allows us to understand better how you will engage with the Creative Archive and the functionality we need to provide in order to ensure your needs and expectations are met.

2. Audience understanding of the licence - the concept behind the Creative Archive is expressed in the licence under which we distribute material. The pilot will allow us to introduce, test and improve the licence to ensure that this novel consumption model is understood.

3. Policy and markets - in discussions with the market place and surrounding non-profit sector it has become clear that there is a need for a working model to drive informed discussion. A working model also allows us to test market theories, including the potential for concurrent commercial/non-commercial pathways for material. At an editorial policy level, the pilot is designed to test challenging content areas.