VU TV archive, NBC Universal in streaming pact

NBC keeps a grip on newscasts, Vanderbilt offers access to history in the making

Email | Print By Milt Capps

Breeding

Vanderbilt University and NBC Universal have agreed the Vanderbilt Television News Archive may transmit via the Internet nearly 9,000 hours of NBC News reports to North American college scholars and students who subscribe to the new service.

As fate would have it, the milestone agreement comes amid 2008 presidential campaigning, echoing the Archive's creation following media coverage of violence that erupted during a presidential convention in 1968.

In making today's announcement, Archive Executive Director Marshall Breeding stressed that streamed content will be tightly controlled to ensure it is used only by customers at subscribing colleges and universities.

"It's not in our interest and it's not in NBC's interest for this stuff to show up wholesale on YouTube.com," he told NashvillePost.com this afternoon.

The licensing agreement will not only allow campus scholars easier access to historic news content, but also may enable the Archive to rely less on the Vanderbilt subsidies it has received most years since its inception. The Archive's break-even budget is about $500,000 per year.

Breeding said rates and fees for the new service, which will be consistent with the Archive's existing fee structure, have not been finalized. Fees range from $25 to hundreds of dollars per retrieval, depending on the researcher's subscriber status.

The Archive contains nearly 900,000 newscasts – nearly 30,000 hours of content – primarily from ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN and Fox News.

NBC Universal is controlled by majority owner General Electric and co-owner Vivendi Entertainment Universal. Archive users who want to use newscasts for commercial purposes will negotiate licensing directly with NBC Universal.

Breeding said that, after decades of on-and-off discussions, the agreement emerged from more than a year of earnest negotiations. During the process, both NBC executives and Vanderbilt's technology-transfer and legal professionals worked to preserve their respective intellectual-property rights. The result: NBC retains all ownership of the news content; Vanderbilt retains all rights to news abstracts and related material created by Archive staff.