RTE award contract to digitise over 50 years of its historic archives
RTÉ has awarded a €3.2m contract to digitise its entire archive consisting of around 300,000 tapes of TV and radio broadcasts dating back to 1950, the Irish Mail on Sunday can reveal.
The State broadcaster put out an invitation to tender for the lucrative contract to digitise its massive archive last September at a cost of €3,225,000.
Unsuccessful companies were contacted in recent weeks to inform them the contract had been awarded in its entirety to French company Vectracom.
The awarding of the contract follows a recommendation by the RTÉ Archive Review Group, which said digitising the broadcaster’s vast archive was ‘a matter of some urgency’. Last September the group said it needed to be done to
Project was ‘a matter of some urgency’
safeguard ‘endangered historic recordings’ and to guarantee their future existence.
The collection of recordings comprises 300,000 hours and 235,000 tapes of TV broadcasts since 1985 on the Betacam SP format; 65,000 quarter-inch audio tapes from 1950 to 2003; and the copying of 110,000 discs representing the commercial music library.
RTÉ converted from film to the new Betacam SP tapes in October 1985. Many historic moments in Irish TV history were brought to life from the new format.
These would include, for example, Gay Byrne’s gasp-inducing 1993 interview with Annie Murphy when she talked about her affair with Bishop Eamon Casey or the famous moment when Eamon Dunphy threw his pen in disgust after Ireland drew 0-0 with Egypt during Italia ’90.
Industry insiders said RTÉ has been slow to provide a digital archive for both its own producers and those in the independent sector compared with other European and UK broadcasters.
One producer told the MoS: ‘The absence of a digital archive has traditionally made archive searches more costly for independent producers as they have to pay RTÉ staff to do the search rather than do an online search themselves.’
The producer added RTÉ stood to make considerable gain from a new, easily accessible archive. However, an RTÉ spokesman insisted the broadcaster was not digitising the archive for financial gain.
The spokesman told the MoS: ‘This is about preserving significant elements of Ireland’s national audiovisual archives as an integral part of RTÉ’s public service obligations and our mission to create a living record of Irish society.’
The head of archives at RTÉ, Bríd Dooley, was until last October also the president of FIAT, a global association for those engaged in the preservation and exploitation of broadcast archives. Its annual conference last year was hosted remotely by Dee Forbes.
Vectracom has been a major sponsor of the organisation in the past.
However, RTÉ said there was no conflict of interest in awarding the contract to the French company.
The broadcaster said: ‘This is an EU public procurement process, which is subject to strict public procurement rules.’
However, the news that the €3m has gone to a French company has caused considerable anger in the independent TV production sector.
Industry sources said audiovisual companies tendering for this type of work are part of an essential production chain supporting independent TV producers.
‘I know of an Irish company who tendered for this, it had the capacity, it had the know-how,’ one member of the industry told the MoS.
‘This is another kick in the teeth for an industry on its knees.’