BBC Preserves 100 Years of History by Migrating Archives to Amazon S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval

The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), a UK public service broadcaster serving millions globally, maintains one of the world's largest media archives containing 16 million assets spanning 100 years of television, radio, and digital content. Previously, the BBC's archives were fragmented across separate repositories organized by genre—news, sports, radio, and programs—creating complexity in content aggregation and limiting accessibility. The organization needed a centralized, sustainable archiving strategy that would preserve its vast collection for future generations while enabling content discovery through modern technologies. After successfully running its media asset processing system on AWS for years, the BBC chose to migrate its entire archive to Amazon Web Services, specifically leveraging Amazon S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval for long-term preservation and cost optimization.

Beginning in November 2022, the BBC partnered with AWS and Cloudfirst.io to execute a large-scale cloud migration using AWS Direct Connect, a dedicated network service enabling reliable high-speed data transfers. At peak capacity, the team transferred 120 TB of data per day, completing the migration of 25 PB of content within 10 months. By implementing Amazon S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval alongside Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering, the BBC achieved flexible storage with automatic cost optimization without compromising retrieval speed. The migration allowed the organization to retire approximately 50% of its physical tape-based infrastructure, freeing valuable data center space and reducing operational overhead in its Central London facilities. The new architecture established a next-generation abstraction layer between the BBC's media asset management systems and public cloud storage.

With its archives now unified and standardized on AWS, the BBC is positioned to unlock new value through data-driven innovation. The organization plans to implement machine learning tools including speech-to-text and facial recognition to dramatically improve content discoverability and searchability across its entire collection. This cloud-native foundation supports the BBC's long-term vision of preserving and making its content accessible to audiences for another 100 years while maintaining the flexibility to adopt emerging technologies. The consolidated data lake approach enables the BBC to make informed storage placement decisions early in projects and continuously optimize costs as access patterns evolve.