Huge demand for footage exposes lack of facilities to transfer tape and film after move to New Broadcasting House

Huge demand for archive footage of the late Lady Thatcher has exposed problems with plans to make the BBC's New Broadcasting House "tapeless'.

BBC News staff are having to ferry tapes across London in taxis or pay thousands of pounds to get outside companies to get videos converted to digital.

According to BBC sources, footage for Tuesday's TV news bulletins had to be physically brought from the corporation's archive storage in Perivale in north-west London to New Broadcasting House by a member of staff on the tube.

The issue is understood to be affecting every area of output which uses archive including Newsnight, BBC1's news bulletins and the BBC News Channel.

There has been some concern among staff since the last journalists moved from Television Centre into the state-of-the-art headquarters for BBC News last month that the lack of facilities to transfer tape and film material to the site's digital content management system might cause problems.

According to one BBC insider, after the death of Thatcher on Monday at one point there were four producers in the bulletins area queuing up to use the one tape machine that had been provided and in Newsnight's area "there are tapes all over the place".

One BBC current affairs source said: "We have a multimillion-pound digital archive and we are delivering tapes on the tube."

BBC staff said they are having to take material that needs to be converted to digital to outside post-production houses because of the corporation's plan to make NBH a "tapeless environment".

Rate cards for two post production companies show the BBC is being charged between £100.21 and £300 an hour to get material transferred to a format that can be viewed.

One BBC staff source said that even when the film or tape has been converted it still needs to be fed into the BBC's centralised digital CMS for news – called Jupiter – so it can be edited for transmission, and claimed there are queues because there are not enough facilities to do this.

The problem is that although anything shot over the past few months is digital, footage shot before 2012 and right back to the beginning of TV broadcasting is on tape or film.

The BBC is converting its archive into digital but it is not due to be completed for another couple of years.

BBC News' old home in Television Centre did have what is called a "media transfer area" called Media Exchange to convert material on tape or film to digital formats.

But the corporation said it does not want to install expensive equipment that it claims would be rarely used as in the future all programmes shot on digital will be stored on computers.

However, some of the tape conversion machines that were used in Television Centre are being stored in the engineers' area of NBH and could be easily converted, according to BBC insiders.

A BBC spokeswoman said: "Programme makers in [NBH] are being encouraged to work in a different way on new digital equipment. In the vast majority of cases this means transferring material acquired in the field into our content management system where it can be edited. Sometimes we still have to work from tapes.

"We have facilities to manage this in house but it can be cheaper to use local production houses for less common formats. A new media support centre is also currently being built to provide more in-house resource."

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