Audio Visual Services (AVS)

The BFI and its strategic partners are responsible for the preservation and public accessibility of a significant share of UK audio visual heritage. It is universally accepted that content essentially ‘locked’ within obsolete tape-based audio and video recording systems are increasingly at risk due to the proprietary and commercially unsupported nature of the products used to create them over a period spanning many decades.While the BFI and its partners maintain considerable expertise and machinery to support and preserve these formats through digitisation, it is clear that greater capacity through commercial provision will be required to facilitate an accelerated programme of large-scale digitisation for video and audio content to provide suitable digital file formats and associated metadata for long-term preservation.