Inside the BBC's Archive Business: Licensing, Live Events and Music with Dominic Walker

Inside the BBC's Archive Business: Licensing, Live Events and Music with Dominic Walker

Dominic Walker, Global Business Director at BBC Studios, joins The Archive Room to explain how one of the world's largest broadcast archives is run as a business. We cover archive footage licensing through BBC Motion Gallery and its fifteen year partnership with Getty Images, live events built from BBC IP including Planet Earth concert tours and Bluey's World at Disney, and BBC Radio and Music, spanning the Production Music Library and a toolkit built from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop archive. Dominic also traces his own career, starting as a booking agent alongside Miles Copeland and The Police, through music publishing at BMG and Universal, into television at Fremantle Media and eventually BBC Worldwide. For anyone working in documentary archive research, TV archive history or archival storytelling, this is a rare look inside how a major broadcaster balances commercial licensing with editorial values, and why story always comes first regardless of format. Topics covered: archive footage licensing, BBC Motion Gallery, Getty Images partnership, archive digitisation, documentary archive research, TV archive history, BBC Production Music, Radiophonic Workshop, music licensing, live events and immersive experiences, archival storytelling. The Archive Room is presented by Silver Salt Restoration, a John Gore Studios company. New episodes weekly on the people, footage and history behind the archives that shape our screens.

How Paramount Restores Hollywood's Greatest Films with Charlotte Barker

What does it actually take to restore a Hollywood classic? In this episode Dominic Dare and Sandra Coelho sit down with Charlotte Barker, Senior Director of Film Restoration and Preservation at Paramount Pictures, where she has worked since 2005 and led the restoration team since 2019. Charlotte oversees one of the most significant film libraries in cinema history, spanning over 114 years of filmmaking and including the full Republic Pictures catalogue. Her restoration credits include To Catch a Thief, White Christmas, Sunset Boulevard, Chinatown, Dragonslayer, Ragtime and Harold and Maude. In 2023 her team won the inaugural Hollywood Professional Association Award for Best Restoration for The Godfather, and in 2025 the Sunset Boulevard restoration received the first DEG NTEC Award for Technology Innovation in Film Restoration. In this conversation they get into what preservation actually means versus restoration, how Paramount selects titles for its programme each year, what happens when 14 frames of Sunset Boulevard were simply missing, and why VistaVision — a format most people had never heard of two years ago — is now being shot by filmmakers like Brady Corbet on The Brutalist. They also cover nitrate handling, frozen vaults, the silent heroes of any restoration project, and the very particular pressure of working on somebody's favourite film. The Archive Room is presented to you by Silver Salt Restoration, the UK's foremost film and television restoration company and a John Gore Studios company. Find them at silversaltrestoration.com.

AI and the Fight to Protect Archive Footage — with Rachel Antell and Laura Rooney - (Audio Only Version)

Generative AI is producing 34 million synthetic images every day. For archives, documentary producers, and footage researchers, that changes everything about what can be trusted, what can be licensed, and what history will look like on screen. In this episode of The Archive Room, we sit down with Rachel Antell, Co-Founder of the Archival Producers Alliance (APA), and Laura Rooney, Executive Director of the Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA), to discuss the Trust in Archives Initiative — the most significant collective response the archive and documentary community has produced to the AI challenge. TAI has published a practical toolkit designed for archive professionals, footage researchers, and documentary producers. We go through all four components in detail: the Due Diligence Checklist for authenticating archive footage in an AI-saturated landscape; two adaptable licensing templates that protect collections from unfettered AI use; a shared taxonomy so the whole field is finally speaking the same language; and a ten-consideration framework for any archive being approached by a tech company wanting access to their collections. We also get into the access paradox — how the footage archives need to make public to serve researchers is now the same footage being scraped without consent — and what the IMLS defunding means for institutions already operating on the thinnest of margins. Plus: the moment a major streaming platform responded to a TAI licence by asking for unfettered use of generative AI on the licensed material. The Trust in Archives Initiative is a coalition of the Archival Producers Alliance, the Association of Moving Image Archivists, the Society for American Archivists, FootageFest, FOCAL International, and the Digital Object Authenticity Working Group. TAI is running a free four-part webinar series on the toolkit. Register below. Assessing Authenticity: Due Diligence in the Age of AI | 16 June https://www.eventbrite.com/e/assessing-authenticity-due-diligence-in-the-age-of-ai-tickets-1988961465284 [https://www.eventbrite.com/e/assessing-authenticity-due-diligence-in-the-age-of-ai-tickets-1988961465284] Content Licensing: Navigating Rights in the Age of AI | 23 June https://www.eventbrite.com/e/content-licensing-navigating-rights-in-the-age-of-ai-tickets-1988961933685 [https://www.eventbrite.com/e/content-licensing-navigating-rights-in-the-age-of-ai-tickets-1988961933685] Strategic Engagement with Technology Companies | 8 July https://www.eventbrite.com/e/1988962119240 [https://www.eventbrite.com/e/1988962119240] Speaking the Same Language: Taxonomies for AI-Generated and Altered Media | 14 Julyhttps://www.eventbrite.com/e/taxonomies-for-ai-generated-and-altered-media-tickets-1988962319840 [https://www.eventbrite.com/e/taxonomies-for-ai-generated-and-altered-media-tickets-1988962319840] More at trustinarchives.org | archivalproducers.org | amianet.org This episode is presented by Silver Salt Restoration — the UK's foremost film and television restoration company, and a John Gore Studios company. Find them at silversaltrestoration.com. The Archive Room is a video podcast about archive footage — the people who preserve it, license it, restore it, and fight for it. Hosted by Dominic Dare and Sandra Coelho. Find us on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, iHeartRadio, and Podbean.

How to Make Money From Your Content Library with Matthew Frank - Audio Only Version

Matthew Frank has spent over 30 years at the top of television rights and distribution. He built RDF Rights from the ground up, ran Zodiak Rights as CEO generating revenues exceeding $80 million across 200 broadcasters worldwide, and now runs Rocket Rights and Rights Booster, helping content owners exploit their libraries across VOD platforms, FAST channels, and YouTube. In this conversation Matthew breaks down exactly how the content monetisation landscape has shifted and where the real opportunities are right now. He explains why linear broadcasters are no longer the gatekeepers they once were, how FAST channels and YouTube are reshaping what distribution actually means, and why brands are becoming the new commissioners of content. We also get into the story behind Wife Swap — the format that nearly never got made — and the remarkable case of French YouTuber Inoxtag, who turned a 9 million subscriber following into a 50 million view documentary that sold out 200 cinemas in France before it ever hit YouTube. Whether you are a documentary filmmaker, archive manager, rights executive, or content owner trying to navigate a fragmented market, this episode gives you the frameworks and honest industry intelligence you need.

She Found the Secret NYPD Surveillance Footage of John and Yoko — with Rosemary Rotondi

What does archival research really look like on some of the most powerful documentaries of the last decade? Rosemary Rotondi is a New York based archival producer and researcher with over 30 years of experience. Her credits include Attica (Oscar nominated), John & Yoko: One to One (Apple TV+), and American Murder: Gabby Petito (Netflix, 90 million views worldwide). In this episode she takes us behind the scenes of all three films. We hear how she tracked down NYPD surveillance footage of John and Yoko at anti-Vietnam War protests in the New York municipal archives, how Attica footage had simply vanished from upstate New York's small local archives through years of neglect and lack of resources, the story of a film crew who felt threatened filming drone footage outside the prison, and the reality of working on the Gabby Petito police body cam case — including what happened to the officer in that footage two years later. Rosemary also reflects on the emotional toll of working with traumatic archive material, who makes the ethical decisions around disturbing images, the stark lack of diversity in true crime documentary coverage, and what it actually takes to break into archival research. If you work in documentary film, care about film history, or want to understand how archival storytelling really works — this is essential listening.