Journalist seeks help in archiving 2,000 VHS tapes of rare subtitled broadcasts from the late 1990s and early 2000s
Many of the TV shows that were broadcast in the past have had their master tapes lost due to the reuse of tapes under limited budgets, making it difficult to archive them. British journalist James O'Malley, who owns about 2,000 VHS tapes of subtitled TV broadcasts distributed from the late 1990s to the early 2000s, is appealing for anyone who can archive the content.
I have 2000 old VHS tapes in my garage and I don't know what to do with them
The British public broadcaster BBC launched the world's first teletext service, Ceefax, in 1974. Teletext was a type of supplementary subtitling aimed at the hearing impaired and speakers of minority languages, displaying only text on a television screen.
Before the advent of the Internet, the main news media were newspapers, television, and radio. However, newspapers were published only once or twice a day, so they were not very timely, and television and radio broadcast according to pre-determined programs, making it difficult to handle breaking news. However, teletext broadcasting was updated many times a day, making it the most timely news medium.
However, it seems that almost no data from these teletext broadcasts has been preserved. Even the BBC, a public broadcaster, only preserves the most topical news and representative programs, and most of the data is gone. O'Malley calls it 'an act of cultural vandalism.'
In 2011, programmer Alistair Buxton discovered an old VHS tape in the attic of his house. Normally, even if you played the recorded VHS tape on a teletext broadcasting device, you couldn't watch the teletext broadcasts that were distributed at that time.
Still, it turns out that the teletext broadcast signal is sleeping in the data recorded on the VHS tape. So, Mr. Buxton developed a program to extract the teletext broadcast data from the recorded data compressed and stored on the VHS tape, and succeeded in restoring the teletext broadcast. The source code of the program coded by Mr. Buxton is publicly available on GitHub.
GitHub - ali1234/vhs-teletext: Software to recover teletext data from VHS recordings.
https://github.com/ali1234/vhs-teletext
Below is the screen of the teletext broadcast actually restored from Mr. Buxton's tape. In December 1998, the top news shows that Mexico expelled the Cuban ambassador because Cuban Chairman Fidel Castro said, 'Mickey Mouse is more famous among children than any historical figure in Mexico.'
In addition to news, Teletext also had a magazine-like content that summarized letters to editors and game strategy information, as shown below. 'The Digitiser', which was distributed by Teletext, is a content for young people, and is being archived little by little by the people who were viewers at the time using a program developed by Mr. Buxton.
The 2,000 VHS tapes that O'Malley has were discovered by a friend of his, and contain recordings of TV shows that were broadcast from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s. The original owner recorded them for a neighbor, and when he was getting older and wanted to dispose of them, O'Malley's friend took them over.
When O'Malley heard from a friend that he had acquired a large number of VHS tapes, he thought, 'This is where the gold mine of teletext broadcasting lies.' So O'Malley took all the VHS tapes from his friend and stored them in his garage.
O'Malley said he spent six months salvaging his own recorded programs and teletext broadcasts, but was only able to process 40 of them during that time. After that, he became busy with work and was no longer able to do anything, but he commented, 'It makes me feel anxious and sick to my stomach to see the unprocessed tapes piling up in my office. It would be a disservice to the pioneers if I didn't do anything.'
There are about 30 cardboard boxes of VHS tapes, and O'Malley said, 'If you know anyone who can take these tapes and store them, or who can preserve the teletext data and video recordings, please contact me.'
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