TV ARK: Returns Jan 2020

From the Facebook page


Will the site finaly get the rest of the clips and pages restored?

The site is back up - but no new look.

I do wonder why TV Ark haven't opted for the YouTube root for hosting its videos. Then again, what with all the copyright strikes...

Yeah it only takes one bot totake down 3 copyrighted videos and the whole uploading the entire site has to start over!

Of course back in the days before YouTube and fast internet came along (where YouTube Towers is now was once a field ) sites that hosted video clips were often self contained - ie they hosted the clips themselves and often had their own proprietary players (like TV Ark does) to play them, typically some cobbled together Flash creation. And for any decent picture quality the files were huge compared to the typical internet speeds of the era.

Vimeo and YouTube rewrote the rules, coming in at pretty much the right time to take advantage in the mid 2000's as broadband began to become both cheaper and ultimately the norm, allowing any Tom, Dick and Harry to stick a video on their website without having to host it themselves.

TV Ark do say they have the blessing of various ITV companies and libraries to use their material, which may (or may not) be enough to placate the automated bots so far as copyright strikes go.

The fact that ITV content has been taken down by BBC Worldwide in the past, that blessing probably means sod all.

They had their whole ITV Sport page removed years ago, never to return.

A lot of hard work obviously still goes into the site so I'm not bothered that they don't update it as much as they used to, but I do hope they stop using Flash in future, I mostly use iOS. Is so I rarely use the site as much. Good that they've been uploding new clips to Facebook in the interim.

Which may explain why they tend to host their own videos out of reach of the often overzealous bots. A lot of them were introduced because of the copyright issues of uploading things - somebody uploading a video of their cat falling off the dining room table isn't an issue, but uploading Mary Poppins in an unedited form wasn't specifically warned off in the early days - it was alluded to but these days the warning is so much stronger and noticeable than it was 10 years ago, but people clearly don't read it hence the bots.

SImilary I use iOS (which has no Flash) and MacOS (upon which I wont install Flash, on Apple's advice) and this means sadly that there is little of interest on the site for me. Which is a crying shame as they have some of the best archives I have seen.

I've been on Mac for years and never had an issue with Flash, nor TV Ark.

Flash is very very insecure. Which is why no Apple products come with it on, Jobs wouldn't permit it. It's like leaving a sign on your front door saying "I'm not home, and the cash is in my kitchen drawer" - inviting trouble. You've maybe just been lucky. It's also elderly and obsolete, to go with unsecure!

Flash wasn't supported on iOS because it would have killed the App Store and the 30% fees that Apple takes. Jobs wasn't looking at people's security, he was looking at his bottom line.