TVARK is an online archival website of images, sound and video clips illustrating

British television Regular television broadcasts in the United Kingdom started in 1936 as a public service which was free of advertising, which followed the first demonstration of a transmitted moving image in 1926. Currently, the United Kingdom has a collection ...

presentation A presentation conveys information from a speaker to an audience. Presentations are typically demonstrations, introduction, lecture, or speech meant to inform, persuade, inspire, motivate, build goodwill, or present a new idea/product. Presenta ...

history. Content includes

idents Station identification (ident, network ID or channel ID or bumper) is the practice of radio and television stations and networks identifying themselves on-air, typically by means of a call sign or brand name (sometimes known, particularly in the ...

, programme promotions,

title sequence A title sequence (also called an opening sequence or intro) is the method by which films or television programmes present their title and key production and cast members, utilizing conceptual visuals and sound (often a opening theme song with visu ...

public information film Public information films (PIFs) are a series of government-commissioned short films, shown during television advertising breaks in the United Kingdom. The name is sometimes also applied, ''faute de mieux'', to similar films from other countries, ...

commercials A television advertisement (also called a television commercial, TV commercial, commercial, spot, television spot, TV spot, advert, television advert, TV advert, television ad, TV ad or simply an ad) is a span of television programming produce ...

, daily start-ups and closedowns, break bumpers and station clocks. Each item has a short written analysis. The selection of clips represents the work of many broadcasting and

production companies A production company, production house, production studio, or a production team is a studio that creates works in the fields of performing arts, new media art, film, television, radio, comics, interactive arts, video games, websites, music, an ...

, principally the national and regional divisions of the

BBC #REDIRECT BBC #REDIRECT BBC #REDIRECT BBC Here i going to introduce about the best teacher of my life b BALAJI sir. He is the precious gift that I got befor 2yrs . How has helped and thought all the concept and made my success in the 10th board ex ...

and

ITV ITV or iTV may refer to: ITV *Independent Television (ITV), a British television network, consisting of: ** ITV (TV network), a free-to-air national commercial television network covering the United Kingdom, the Isle of Man, and the Channel Islan ...

, plus

Channel 4 Channel 4 is a British free-to-air public broadcast television network operated by the state-owned enterprise, state-owned Channel Four Television Corporation. It began its transmission on 2 November 1982 and was established to provide a four ...

/ S4C, Channel 5, various

British Sky Broadcasting Sky UK Limited is a British broadcaster and telecommunications company that provides television and broadband Internet services, fixed line and mobile telephone services to consumers and businesses in the United Kingdom. It is a subsidiary of ...

(formerly Sky Television and

British Satellite Broadcasting British Satellite Broadcasting (BSB) was a television company, headquartered in London, that provided direct broadcast satellite television services to the United Kingdom. They started broadcasting on 25 March 1990. The company was merged with ...

) networks, and a few other

digital Digital usually refers to something using discrete digits, often binary digits. Technology and computing Hardware *Digital electronics, electronic circuits which operate using digital signals **Digital camera, which captures and stores digital i ...

satellite A satellite or artificial satellite is an object intentionally placed into orbit in outer space. Except for passive satellites, most satellites have an electricity generation system for equipment on board, such as solar panels or radioisotope ...

and

cable Cable may refer to: Mechanical * Nautical cable, an assembly of three or more ropes woven against the weave of the ropes, rendering it virtually waterproof * Wire rope, a type of rope that consists of several strands of metal wire laid into a hel ...

channels. Programme clips are grouped into genres such as

quiz shows A quiz is a form of game or mind sport in which players attempt to answer questions correctly on one or several specific topics. Quizzes can be used as a brief assessment in education and similar fields to measure growth in knowledge, abilities ...

fundraising events Fundraising or fund-raising is the process of seeking and gathering voluntary financial contributions by engaging individuals, businesses, charitable foundations, or governmental agencies. Although fundraising typically refers to efforts to gathe ...

and imported shows. This website is dedicated to the founder's late mother, Valerie Hackett.

History

Television Ark was founded in the

dial-up Dial-up Internet access is a form of Internet access that uses the facilities of the public switched telephone network (PSTN) to establish a connection to an Internet service provider (ISP) by dialing a telephone number on a conventional telepho ...

era on 8 November 1998, as a one-man hobby site. There were just a few pages containing a handful of

low resolution Image resolution is the detail an image holds. The term applies to digital images, film images, and other types of images. "Higher resolution" means more image detail. Image resolution can be measured in various ways. Resolution quantifies how ...

clips that were easy to download, but were smaller to look at than an average postage stamp. Over the years, clips and images grew in size and quantity. The site expanded and was run entirely as a hobby by an eight-man team, with updates and additions made whenever time permitted. In December 2005, they absorbed the remains of SchoolsTV.com, a website dedicated to television programming for schools. During the summer of 2006, it was announced on their home page that they were having a summer break and would relaunch the site in the future. Unfortunately, higher resolution copies of previous clips were never made. The site relaunched on 25 December 2006 with very limited content, as well as few better quality clips put into a new download system in an effort to prevent hotlinking and preserve

bandwidth Bandwidth commonly refers to: * Bandwidth (signal processing) or ''analog bandwidth'', ''frequency bandwidth'', or ''radio bandwidth'', a measure of the width of a frequency range * Bandwidth (computing), the rate of data transfer, bit rate or thr ...

. This proved very unpopular as clips took much longer to view, especially for those with slower internet connections. In addition, the relaunch saw the addition of a semi-transparent

watermark A watermark is an identifying image or pattern in paper that appears as various shades of lightness/darkness when viewed by transmitted light (or when viewed by reflected light, atop a dark background), caused by thickness or density variations ...

(

DOG The dog (''Canis familiaris'' or ''Canis lupus familiaris'') is a domesticated descendant of the wolf. Also called the domestic dog, it is derived from the extinct Pleistocene wolf, and the modern wolf is the dog's nearest living relative. Do ...

) to new clips added to the site, to discourage "web snatching" of clips. Despite this, clips from TVARK have appeared on other sites, notably YouTube. In July 2009, TVARK announced the end of

RealMedia RealMedia is a proprietary multimedia container format created by RealNetworks with the filename extension . RealMedia is generally used in conjunction with RealVideo and RealAudio, while also being used for streaming content over the Internet. T ...

used on the site, with videos now using

Adobe Flash Adobe Flash (formerly Macromedia Flash and FutureSplash) is a multimedia Computing platform, software platform used for production of Flash animation, animations, rich web applications, application software, desktop applications, mobile apps, mo ...

streaming in H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, and the service called TVARK Interactive will include user accounts commenting on video statistics. Since mid-2016, updates have ceased on the site. However, its social media pages (notably Facebook and Twitter) are being regularly updated with new material, with the site itself being offline starting in March 2017 for the preparation of a "brand new website". The site originally stated it would return "later in 2017". However, subsequent delays had continued to push back the launch date of the new site resulting in the site being offline for the entire rest of the decade. According to a message on the TVARK home page, the team were aiming to launch the new site "as soon as possible". On 8 November 2019, TVARK announced that they would relaunch on 19 January 2020. This new version of the website would contain more adverts, programmes, British and international channels, along with all videos previously on this site. The new website also has new and recaptured footage, adverts and intros of programmes. Shortly after the soft relaunch on 19 January of that year, the website went down due to connection error issues, citing "overwhelming demand", and would officially relaunch shortly after TVARK posted an update stating their website's tech head found the connection issues and that their staff were working to fix the issue quickly. The site reappeared on 25 January. TVARK also stated on Twitter that while their site is in the Beta stage, their site could experience minor interruptions and brief outages during the Beta period. The original website, tv-ark.org.uk, is back up, but only the welcome screen is available.

Forums

It was decided in late December 2005 by TVARK's owners to close its forums. The forum was originally scheduled to close on 31 December, however the forums were removed earlier than planned on 18 December of that year. A new forum, The TV Lounge, was set up by the former forum staff as a separate venture. This forum closed in early 2007 and was replaced by The TV Shelter, which had most of the members from both its predecessors. The TV Shelter closed on 8 April 2014, but remains open to visitors and past members as an archive. Another new forum, The TV Lounge, was established that same year (30 July) as an initial collaboration with two former members of The TV Shelter. The name was intended as a tribute to the community's heritage. Since the closure of the TVARK forums, TVARK continues to operate as before, with a new guest book being established in its place. In July 2022, TVARK relaunched its forum after the closure of TV Forum and its successor, TV Live Forum.

Sections

Following the major relaunch in January 2020, TVARK is divided into many sections that each cover programming, idents and presentation and other aspects of television:

Submitting material

The organisers accept tapes of vintage television presentation through the post. Formats accepted by TVARK (in alphabetical order): *

Beta SP Betacam is a family of half-inch professional Videocassette#Cassette formats, videocassette products developed by Sony in 1982. In colloquial use, "Betacam" singly is often used to refer to a Betacam camcorder, a Betacam tape, a Betacam video rec ...

(PAL) *

Betamax Betamax (also known as Beta, as in its logo) is a consumer-level analog recording and cassette format of magnetic tape for video, commonly known as a video cassette recorder. It was developed by Sony and was released in Japan on May 10, 1975, ...

(PAL) *

DigiBeta Betacam is a family of half-inch professional videocassette products developed by Sony in 1982. In colloquial use, "Betacam" singly is often used to refer to a Betacam camcorder, a Betacam tape, a Betacam video recorder or the format itself. All ...

(PAL) *

DVCAM DV refers to a family of codecs and tape formats used for storing digital video, launched in 1995 by a consortium of video camera manufacturers led by Sony and Panasonic. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, DV was strongly associated with the ...

(PAL) *

DVCPRO DV refers to a family of codecs and tape formats used for storing digital video, launched in 1995 by a consortium of video camera manufacturers led by Sony and Panasonic. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, DV was strongly associated with the t ...

(PAL) *

DVD-R DVD recordable and DVD rewritable are optical disc recording technologies. Both terms describe DVD optical discs that can be written to by a DVD recorder, whereas only 'rewritable' discs are able to erase and rewrite data. Data is written ('burne ...

DVD+R The DVD (common abbreviation for Digital Video Disc or Digital Versatile Disc) is a digital optical disc data storage format. It was invented and developed in 1995 and first released on November 1, 1996, in Japan. The medium can store any ki ...

(PAL & NTSC) *

HDCAM HDCAM is a high-definition video digital recording videocassette version of Digital Betacam introduced in 1997 that uses an 8-bit discrete cosine transform (DCT) compressed 3:1:1 recording, in 1080i-compatible down-sampled resolution of 144 ...

Mini DV DV refers to a family of codecs and tape formats used for storing digital video, launched in 1995 by a consortium of video camera manufacturers led by Sony and Panasonic. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, DV was strongly associated with the ...

(PAL) * N1500/N1700 *

U-matic U-matic is an analogue recording videocassette format first shown by Sony in prototype in October 1969, and introduced to the market in September 1971. It was among the first video formats to contain the videotape inside a cassette, as oppo ...

Video 2000 Video 2000 (also known as V2000, with the tape standard Video Compact Cassette, or VCC) is a consumer videocassette system and analogue recording standard developed by Philips and Grundig to compete with JVC's VHS and Sony's Betamax video techn ...

* VHS (

PAL Phase Alternating Line (PAL) is a colour encoding system for analogue television. It was one of three major analogue colour television standards, the others being NTSC and SECAM. In most countries it was broadcast at 625 lines, 50 fields (25 ...

NTSC The first American standard for analog television broadcast was developed by National Television System Committee (NTSC)National Television System Committee (1951–1953), Report and Reports of Panel No. 11, 11-A, 12–19, with Some supplement ...

)

Reviews and awards

Wanadoo Wanadoo was the Internet service provider division of Orange S.A. It operated in France, Spain, the United Kingdom, Belgium, the Netherlands, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Senegal, Mauritius, Madagascar, Lebanon and Jordan. It ceased to operate as ...

(Summer 2004): Ten of Best (4) * Web User (May 2004): Number 4 (Wallow in TV nostalgia) *

TV Cream TV Cream is a British television nostalgia website, which has expanded to cover not only television, but film, toys, books, and other objects. ''The Daily Telegraph'' called it "a labour of love" and praised "the standard of the writing". In 2003, ...

(April 2004): TV Cream's Top 50 Media Movers & Shakers (48) * BBC Somerset Sound: Discussing TVARK (Rating 5/5)

References

External links

* {{Portal bar, United Kingdom, Television, Internet, History Internet properties established in 1998 Online archives of the United Kingdom Television presentation in the United Kingdom Television websites Nostalgia websites History of broadcasting History of television in the United Kingdom History websites of the United Kingdom

History

Forums

Sections

Submitting material

Reviews and awards

See also

References

External links