Box of Broadcasts (BoB)

BoB National is a shared off-air recording and media archive. BoB ( short for Box of Broadcasts) provides staff and students with online access to television and radio programmes from the previous seven days, as well as allowing users to book recordings for broadcasts seven days in advance, from more than 50 television and radio channels. Users may also search thousands of programmes stored in the growing archive.

News Release
3 February 2014

Over one million TV and radio programmes now available for education

From today subscribers to the popular BoB National (Box of Broadcasts) TV and radio recording service will now be able to search for and view over a million off-air TV and radio programmes.

Subscribers can compile playlists of extracts or full titles for personal use or to share with other staff and students. Searches can be run by title or keyword and the BoB National archives are held indefinitely for access by all registered users.

To find out more about subscribing visit the BoB National website (opens in new window), email bob@bufvc.ac.uk or telephone 020 7393 1500.

BoB National will be getting an upgrade in JANUARY 2014. Read more about the new features and updates in our blog post.

Old BoB:

 

BoB is an off-air recording and media archive service. BoB is available to staff and students of member institutions of the British Universities Film & Video Council that hold an ERA+ license. This TV scheduling service allows you to record TV and radio programmes that are scheduled to be broadcast over the next seven days as well as retrieving programmes from the last seven days from a selected list of recorded channels.

 

http://bobnational.net

 

After a programme is recorded users can stream a Flash video in a web page - in a similar way to BBC's iPlayer. BoB stores recorded TV and Radio programmes in an archive indefinitely* for all users to enjoy. The archive currently offers over 45,000 TV and radio programmes covering all genres, and that number is set to rise as more further and higher education institutions join BoB.

 

Users can record programmes, watch programmes from the archive, create clips, search for programmes coming up in the next seven days by title or keyword, compile their favourite shows into playlists and share these with others.

 

Accessing the system is easy. Once an institution is registered at the appropriate level of membership with the BUFVC and certifies that it holds an ERA+ licence, users can sign on with their Athens or Shibboleth account or use their email address and a password. That's all they will need in future to schedule recordings and stream tens of thousands of programmes and playlists.

 

BoB is a collaboration between Cambridge Imaging Systems, the BUFVC (who coincidentally first coined the term 'BoB' - Box of broadcasts - when the first system was commissioned back in 2000) and The Centre for Excellence in Media Practice, Bournemouth University, who have brought their expertise to the development of BoB.

 

The latest version of BoB (version 3.5) includes the following new features:

 

Subtitle searching

Results sorting and filtering

Relevancy engine

Regional broadcasts

Curated playlists

Higher bitrate video