Sunday, December 30, 2012

Another page in the Domesday Book

May 15, 2011
For an informed view on connected entertainment in the UK & Ireland, visit Cue Entertainment 


The BBC unveiled its Domesday Reloaded website this month and restored public access to the interactive Domesday Project to which more than a million people contributed in 1986. The content was almost lost forever when the technology failed to catch on. Thanks to a few dedicated enthusiasts who converted the data to a 21st century alternative, the many people who participated 25 years ago can at last go online and re-discover the England they inhabited.

The story of the Domesday Project contains an underlying warning for content owners tempted to mortgage their future fortunes to any single technology: innovation inevitably leads to obsolescence.
In the 1980s, pupils and teachers from 14,000 schools surveyed their local areas in an attempt to recreate the 1086 original. The text and photos they gathered was compiled on 12-inch LV-ROM Laservision discs controlled by a BBC Micro Master computer. The complete package sold for £5,000, which would be expensive even now, and it’s no surprise that the BBC sold fewer than 1,000 systems.

Today, the computer and player hardware is obsolete and hard to find. Few discs remain, mostly due to a problem known as “laser rot”, and they are frequently unplayable. Without the efforts of George Auckland and Alex Mansfield at BBC Learning and the image reclamation work of project co-founder Andy Finney, the project would have been lost to public view. The BBC website, which went live on May 12, provides a priceless window into the world of the 1980s.

We are so familiar with digital data that it is easy to forget its ephemeral nature. Hardware breaks down; repairs and spares are unobtainable; and formats simply fall into disuse. Online, there are many potential points of failure in the link between content owner and consumer. An unpredictable malfunction in a data centre can lead to the loss of consumer content in a moment, as Amazon, Sony and others have recently found to their cost.
Increasingly, our entertainment is stored in the cloud, hundreds or perhaps thousands of miles from the user. Information comes and goes, wirelessly or through glass fibre; the connected TV plucks programmes from a digital Freeview transmitter, a satellite in space or a broadband connection: what can possibly go wrong?

According to a December 2010 survey by backup and recovery specialists Acronis, while 83% of consumers recognise the need to back up their data, only 15% do so on a regular basis. A quarter of those polled run backups only when they remember and almost a third never backup their systems at all. Only when discs crash, laptops get lost or data is accidentally deleted do the consequences become clear. The irreplaceable family photos, holiday videos and downloaded content have gone, usually forever.

Late MPAA President Jack Valenti once said of DVD and Blu-ray Discs, “You can’t backup wine glasses, why should you backup a movie? If you want a movie, you buy a copy. If you want a backup, you buy another copy.”
Things are about to change, of course. A digital copy of each purchase will be stored in the UltraViolet (UV) digital locker, which promises “lifetime content ownership”. In the near future, should the Blu-ray player in the home give up the ghost, there will always be a UV copy for you to stream or download. Probably.

The Domesday Project demonstrates that a lot can happen in 25 years. Will Blu-ray players be around on which to play our expensively acquired collection by 2035? Will the titles we own still be available online from our digital locker?

But then, who will want to return to the days of ultra-fast fibre to the home delivered through expensive cables buried in the ground when solar-powered light-emitting satellites continuously load our solid-state holographic mobile vaults with every movie ever made? A lifetime of entertainment; at a very reasonable €4,000 per minute …

Successful technology, of course, can be very persistent. Amazon still sells significant numbers of VHS cassettes even though the ageing players are wearing out rapidly. Relying as it does on dragging rusty iron past stationary guides and spinning heads, the mechanical nature of the VHS machine contains the seeds of its own downfall. As with the Compact Cassette, the thin VHS tape curls, creases and snaps, and takes with it both pre-recorded films and personal memories of the past.

Computers, set-top boxes and DVRs contain at least one spinning magnetic disk and this mechanical component is often the weakest link. Despite the fact that modern hard disk drive technology is superficially more secure, a disk crash is the event most likely to bring digital technology to a standstill.

These power-consuming mechanical components already give way to the solid-state drive (SSD) that will transform mobile devices. The SSD has grown in capacity and fallen in price since it was first introduced in 1995. Although the 64 Gbyte flash memory card is relatively expensive today, the cost per Gbyte will fall, even as the capacity continues to rise. The ability of a dual layer Blu-ray Disc to store 50 Gbytes, much vaunted at the launch of the format, already looks inadequate.

There is no physical contact with CD, DVD and Blu-ray drives, so content delivered on these formats should remain playable for some years to come. Digital discs, however, have mechanical components too and the laser that shines its red or blue light onto the spinning disc dims with age. Manufacturers suggest that with average use, modern lasers should last 10-15 years, so the motor that spins the disk will probably give out sooner.

A laptop without an optical disc drive was once almost unthinkable, yet few netbooks, tablets and hand-held games consoles include one today. If (or should it be when?) entertainment content is no longer delivered on disc, the factory-fitted optical drive will vanish rapidly from computers and games consoles as well. Without access to a digital locker and with no easy way to by-pass copy protection systems, most DVD and Blu-ray collections could become rapidly worthless.

The disappearance of a technology rarely happens overnight. Unless there are serious health and safety concerns, most unsuccessful formats simply fade away, which is what happened with the Compact Disc-interactive player that promised to provide “the other half of your TV” in the early 1990s. Together with VideoCD, DVD-Audio, VMD and many other embryo formats, CD-i is now little more than a footnote in the history of content delivery.

When William the Conqueror commissioned the original Domesday Book, he intended it to be the first comprehensive survey of towns and villages in England but the project went unfinished. The king died while the project was still a work in progress and active data collection ended shortly afterwards. Despite this setback, the Domesday Book and its replica editions have been a source of reference for approaching 1,000 years.

The two completed tomes are stored in a specially constructed chest at the National Archive in Kew, near London. Readers need to be conversant with the Latin calligraphy of the time to understand the contents but they require no special equipment to see the pages. 

Some technology has a very long shelf life.

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