Jeremy, Julian, Nate, Tash, Dave and Peter are converging on the British Film Institute (BFI) on 22 July to film aspects of the digitisation process of the 1″ IVC tapes of Knowle West TV. At the BFI Curator, Gosta Johansson, and Press Officer, Brian Robinson, will be welcoming Calling the Shots, Julian Warren from Bristol Records Office and Peter Lewis, from London Metropolitan University and originator of Knowle West TV and Bristol Channel. The BFI possesses one of the very few machines that can record and play this quickly disappearing format.

IVC is an early videotape format and was used by television stations and the military in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Bristol Channel used it to record programming made during its ground-breaking community television experiment in 1973-75.

Here’s a video in German that shows how the IVC format works:

http://youtu.be/yBkYRSFwI5s