Lost Pres websites

TV Whirl isn't dead, as I do a lot of work underneath to keep the whole thing running smoothly (just upgraded the dedicated server behind it this month again), and it does still get some sporadic smaller updates from time to time. It's just on a bit of a long extended hiatus on anything significant pending me having the enthusiasm to give it proper attention, and in some cases awaiting me to find a real reason for it. There's not exactly been any rush though. All new pres that comes out now is well covered by about a million sites, and even by the broadcasters themselves who often tend to post all their pres up on their sites before they've even aired them (my, how things have changed since 2001!). Leaving more of a focus on the older and unusual stuff now, something only TV Ark covers well.

Long may it continue, along with TV archive. and ark.

Glad to hear it I totally agree - if only the navigation bar loaded in Opera I'd say it does well as a museum of sorts.

Annoying thing is there is STILL missing pres which was on line and has never reappear but were stuck with an archive copy. Is there any way to move forward on this issues? there is a wonderful piece about the 1998 Grampain ident from Itc booklet etc. yet lost to the wind.

How can missing Information be brought back to life on the net? There really is some gems which should be shown off.

You could try archive.org. If you don't know the addresses of old sites, run the archive.org on TV Ark's links page.

It seems TV home domain name is up for sale. I have to ask WHERE will the content go?

http://www.tvhome.co.uk/bbcnews24/home.phtml

If Asa wants a place for the content to go, I'll happily host it for him.

I wasn't aware that News 24 section was still up. The TV Home homepage was never updated after the closure of the site, even though the TV Forum Links page no longer exists. To be honest, I'm surprised the domain was never simply redirected to TV Forum.

TV History, originally online at http://tv-archive.co.uk which no longer works, but was simply a frame of http://homepage.ntlworld.com/tvhistory/ which is still online, although annoyingly all the links use the tv-archive.co.uk URL so you have to manually rename them to get to the page. Last updated in 2004.

The videos from this site were uploaded to the YouTube channel tvhist, which seems to be the original owner of the clips but there's nothing on the channel page to say it is.

From 2000, an eleven-year-old called Billy Hicks who should really know better has his "fantasy TV schedule" published on a site called Russnet:

http://web.archive.org/web/20010922202657/http://www.russ-net.freeserve.co.uk/makeoverbh.htm

Yeah, my sense of humour as a pre-teen was bizarre to say the least. And this was when most of my age contemporaries were happily listening to S Club 7 instead.

I'm not entirely sure what caused me at that age to suddenly start a TV pres interest but I remember many of the websites around at the time - TV World as mentioned was awesome, the video files were so small and compressed as to be almost pointless but there was something quite cool about watching a two-second pixellated video of idents from 25 years ago! Brad Jones's Java TV was inspirational and led to the much-missed APFS, James Hudson's Schools TV which merged but never seemed to fully make it to TV Ark, and count me in as someone who misses TV & Radio Bits - even today so much of the information on that site simply can't be found anywhere else, but that's the rest of the internet's fault rather than Rob's.

Happily some remain online, Andrew Wiseman's fantastic http://625.uk.com/ has been mentioned, which hasn't been updated since 2008 (and in general is mostly stuck in the late 90s anyway) but remains online and has some brill stuff on there, particularly Dave Jeffrey's Flash Files, and Sub-TV ( http://www.sub-tv.co.uk/ , last updated 2005) has some cool early schools/satellite TV/ATV pics on there. Sadly it's the rise of Youtube and Facebook which seem to have killed a lot of this off - social media led to the demise of things like Geocities and AOL Hometown which took hundreds of old websites off the internet, and no one's going to download a solitary clip of a five-second ident anymore when you can stream it easily on Youtube. When I was (a lot) younger I was furious if someone stopped updating their site and thought it was some huge injustice and and outrage, etc, not really realising how busy life gets in adulthood and how things can fall by the wayside.

Good job at least for Web Archive and those who've re-encoded their footage to youtube!

Great to see you're still around these parts, Billy. It's good that there's still a little group of Class of 2001 members left! Those were great times - and you're right about the wealth of websites we had back then. I think I suddenly started my TV Pres interest in 2000 as well. I'd always had a fascination with idents, especially news titles. I remember making sure I would always see the start of the Six O'Clock News in the 90s so I could see the titles and hear the music. But I think it was when I first got the internet that I discovered sites like TV Ark, TV Home and all the others around at the same time.

YouTube definitely killed the pres sites - which is awfully sad. The beauty of the dedicated websites was that they were curated by people who were really interested in the content and knew a great deal of useless information about ident history which they included on the sites along with video content. However, I know I like YouTube because in a sense it has opened up the archives far more than was possible 13 years ago. People uploading the contents of entire VHS tapes have unearthed some real gems in recent years. I just feel sorry for the youngsters of 2013 who are just discovering their slightly weird hobby - they have well and truly missed out on some great websites.

Oh and SClub7...... let's not go there!!