Notes on the state of Brazilian television archives: From scattered initiatives to an uncertain future

The current state of Brazilian television archives

Founded in 1965 in Rio de Janeiro, Rede Globo de Televisão ranks among the largest commercial television networks globally, exerting a profound influence on Brazilian culture, tastes and lifestyles. Its telenovelas, in particular, dominated Brazilian television during the 1980s and 1990s (see Hamburger, 2005; de Lopes, 2011; Mattos, 1990). Early in its history, Globo placed significant emphasis on rebroadcasting legacy content: in March 1976, the same year it established its Documentation Centre, the network launched Vale a Pena Ver de Novo (1976-), an afternoon programme initially dedicated to reruns of news segments but shifting in 1980 to focus exclusively on late-afternoon telenovela reruns (see TeleDramaturgia, n.d). In 1983, Globo introduced Video Show (1983-2019), another afternoon programme offering a mix of variety content and featuring segments on past productions, including behind-the-scenes stories (Santana, 2018). As the millennium approached, Globo expanded its preservation initiatives with Globo Video, a project designed to commercialise edited versions of its teledramas on VHS and later DVD (see Castro, 2003). In 2010, Globo further cemented its archival efforts by launching Canal Viva, a basic cable channel dedicated to reruns of the network’s past telenovelas, miniseries and variety programmes (Jornal da Globo, 2010).

This emphasis on legacy content became crucial as Globo began shifting its focus toward streaming services, early on exploring internet-based access to its extensive archive. In 2004, Globo introduced its first video-on-demand platform, Globo Media Centre, followed in 2011 by Globo Marcas Digitais (Globo Digital Brands), both primarily offering recent content, such as sports events, current telenovelas, and selected miniseries. In 2015, Globo launched Globoplay, its most comprehensive streaming platform to date. This platform not only introduced exclusive content produced specifically for streaming and offered live broadcasts of Globo’s network and cable channels, but, notably, it also provided access to both current and archival programming. Unlike Globo’s previous online offerings, which operated on a pay-per-view basis, Globoplay adopted a subscription model, aligning with the structure used by international streaming services like Netflix (for more on the different models of Internet-distributed TV in the US, see Lotz, 2017). Gradually, Globoplay began making archived content accessible through its Replay section, expanding access to the network’s extensive back catalogue (for more on Globo’s other Internet distribution ventures, see dos Santos Neto and Bressan Junior, 2022).

The COVID-19 pandemic significantly impacted the availability of Globo’s archived content, as new subscribers turned to Globoplay for telenovela reruns, while Globo’s main channel relied on re-airing previous titles due to the suspension of regular television production (Cajazeira and Souza, 2020; Jacks et al., 2020; dos Santos Neto and Bressan Junior, 2022; dos Santos Neto and Bressan Junior, 2023a). In response to this renewed interest in classic telenovelas, Globo launched the Resgate project in 2020, releasing a new archival title for streaming each week in high-quality, original uncensored versions with complete opening and ending credits. According to Globo, their entire telenovela back catalogue is scheduled to be available online by 2027 (GShow, 2024). Concurrently, the Originalidade initiative was introduced to replace previously available abbreviated content with its original, unedited versions. Most recently, in January, Globo announced the Fragmentos project, aimed at making available early telenovelas for which only two to 20 episodes have survived, with an estimated 28 titles accessible by 2025.

These initiatives are groundbreaking, as no other network has undertaken the streaming release of its entire fiction catalogue. This approach reflects Globo’s longstanding recognition of the value of legacy content, even before the streaming era. However, it is regrettable that this extensive collection – one that has profoundly influenced Brazilian society since the 1960s – remains inaccessible to non-subscribers. Other avenues for accessing Globo’s historical content do exist. In 1999 for example, Globo launched Globo Universidade, allowing researchers and students to formally request on-site viewings of archival materials. Access to telenovelas is generally limited to 10 to 15 episodes, and originally, only the first and last episodes were accessible (see Busetto, 2014: 399). Scripts may be available for on-site consultation, though reproductions are prohibited. Globo Universidade also offers access to press clippings about network programmes, as well as photos and programme bulletins – newsletters designed to provide the media with programming information. Additionally, Globo Memória, a website devoted to documenting Globo’s production history, offers further archival insights (Memória Globo). Nonetheless, these are limited initiatives, and as discussed further below, reliance on paid, commercial access to content remains an uncertain and unstable solution for researchers.

Among the major Brazilian television networks, only the now-defunct TV Tupi has its archive publicly accessible. Following early experiments in the 1930s and 1940s, media mogul Assis Chateaubriand, owner of Diários Associados – a conglomerate of local radio stations and newspapers – officially inaugurated TV Tupi on 19 September 1950. This event marked the launch of the first television station in Latin America, located in São Paulo; other networks followed shortly. Named after one of Brazil’s principal indigenous language groups, TV Tupi expanded rapidly, becoming the largest Brazilian network by 1956, with up to 11 city stations. However, following the military coup and the establishment of the Globo network in 1965, compounded by the death of Chateaubriand in 1968, TV Tupi encountered significant competition and financial difficulties, ultimately declaring bankruptcy in 1980, 30 years after its inception. By the time of its closure, television was poised to reach 99% of Brazilian territory, with the majority of households having access thanks to state investments in technology. Despite the early beginnings of television in Brazil (followed shortly thereafter by Cuba and Mexico), the geographic spread of television signals took approximately three decades to cover a significant portion of the population – when compared to the United States, where 90% of households across the territory already had television sets 10 years after its inauguration.

Following the bankruptcy of TV Tupi, any surviving materials that were not destroyed in the network’s numerous fires were confiscated by the courts to help settle its labour debts. In 1985, shortly after the end of military rule and just prior to the network’s assets being auctioned, the Federal Government donated the collection to the Cinemateca Brasileira. Currently, over 6000 videos from this collection can be accessed through their online platform, Banco de Conteúdos Culturais (Tupi, 2024). Two significant projects were undertaken in the 2000s to digitise this material: one funded by the Ministry of Justice, aimed at scanning and digitising 125 hours of news film segments, subsequently adding live narration based on scripts stored in the São Paulo State Archive (Cinemateca Brasileira); and the other funded by the São Paulo State Research Foundation (FAPESP), which focused on digitising 100 hours of Tupi’s extensive telenovela archives (Biblioteca Virtual Fapesp, 2009). Additionally, a current initiative is underway to catalogue and analyse Tupi’s television news reports from 1950 to 1974 (Biblioteca Virtual FAPESP, 2022). Despite these valuable efforts, the online materials remain inadequately organised and catalogued; the user interface can be confusing, and the search engine often struggles to locate videos due to subpar cataloguing practices. Besides this collection, some records and videotapes from Tupi were serendipitously discovered in an attic of its Rio de Janeiro office and subsequently donated to the Brazilian National Archives (Busetto, 2014: 397). Presently, nearly 4000 film stocks, approximately 1000 videotapes, and comprehensive documentation detailing the network’s history are available for in-person access, which must be scheduled in advance (Dilrarq, n.d.).

TV Cultura emerged from the parent company of TV Tupi, evolving into Brazil’s first public television channel. Initially established in 1960 as a private educational network linked to Assis Chateaubriand’s Diários Associados, it was acquired by the State of São Paulo in 1967 through the public entity known as the Padre Anchieta Foundation, which continues to oversee the network to this day. Unlike Globo, TV Cultura does not have a systematic programme in place for facilitating access to its archives; however, obtaining in-house access to its digitised database is relatively straightforward (Busetto, 2014: 399; Hamburger and Esperança, 2024). Besides its own materials, Cultura’s archive also houses what is left of another defunct Brazilian network, TV Manchete, but because the company does not hold legal rights over it, this material is not accessible. In 2019, the network began to share a selection of its materials online via its YouTube channel, although this content primarily consists of short scenes and curated segments, with no full programmes available, and the short scenes do not represent the complete runs of any given show (Estadão Conteúdo, 2019). In 2023, the Documentation Centre initiated the digitisation of its archive, which comprises approximately 90,000 film rolls, utilising a new scanner for this purpose. The availability of this digitised material for research purposes has yet to be clarified (Cultura UOL, 2023). Additionally, in the same year, the network launched Cultura Play, a free streaming service that emphasises live and current programming. It remains to be seen whether Cultura will leverage this platform to provide broader public access to its archived materials. Nevertheless, the network has indicated its use of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies for the restoration, up-conversion (converting video signals from lower to higher resolution) and colorisation of older content, suggesting that some archived material may eventually be made available to the public (see Toledo, 2024).

Another network with promising future initiatives is TV Bandeirantes, launched in 1967 in São Paulo, the first Brazilian network to fully colorise its programming in 1972. The network’s Documentation Centre is currently undertaking a project to digitise a portion of its archive, encompassing approximately 7000 hours of content from the television network, along with 5000 hours of content from Rádio Bandeirantes. According to the network’s promotional material, the digitised content will subsequently be made freely available to the public through a new streaming application and website titled ‘Memória Band’. This initiative represents the first, and to our knowledge the only, project by a privately owned Brazilian network aimed at providing access to its historical content to the public outside of a commercial context and at no cost. Given that the network aims to have this project supported by federal funding through the Ministry of Culture’s National Programme for Cultural Support (PRONAC), it holds significant potential to inspire other networks to pursue similar democratising efforts with their archives.

In contrast, Brazil’s oldest network, TV Record, still in operation, has benefitted from public money for digitising and organising its archives, but has not had, to our knowledge, any initiative to open the renovated archive to public access. Launched in 1953 as the fourth television channel in Brazil, the network gained prominence through the 1960s for its live musical competitions, which served as a platform for many young artists from the country’s burgeoning music scene. After experiencing financial difficulties in the 1980s, the network was acquired by the Universal Church, a Neo-charismatic Evangelical organisation that shifted the channel’s focus towards biblical telenovelas in the 2000s. According to the network, it established a non-for-profit organisation named Instituto Ressoar in 2005, which, among its various functions, was tasked with digitising a significant portion of its collection. In 2021, it received federal funding through the National Programme for Cultural Support (PRONAC) for this initiative (Oliva, 2021). However, as of now, no archived material is accessible on the network’s website or through its streaming application, Play Plus, which was launched in 2018. Even though recent reports indicate that Record has suffered considerable losses of archived material, including all of its musicals and telenovelas produced before 1970 as well as content from the 1990s (Tolipan, 2024), documentaries such as A Night in 67 (Uma noite em 67, 2010) feature images and sounds from Record’s music festivals, suggesting that some archival material survived. Nonetheless, a case such as Record’s serves as an example of Brazilian television’s nascent archival and record-keeping efforts.

Access, archive and legacy: Brazilian TV memory and its commercial uses

As our brief survey indicates, Brazilian television archives are predominantly regarded as commodities, whether as potentially auction-able assets in the case of defunct networks, or as sources of commercial value through sales, reruns and subscription-based access models. In the early years, archives were often neglected, with tapes frequently reused to conserve resources, and many archival materials lost to frequent fires. However, in more recent digital times, the perceived monetary value of television archives has fostered a general consensus that these materials warrant organisation and preservation, albeit with a model of paid access, regardless of whether the usage of the collected content will itself be monetised. Most networks operate under the belief that television archives are their exclusive private property; indeed, in Brazil, only rolls of films or tapes related to extinct networks have turned into public archives. This situation reinforces the notion that ‘Brazilian television channel concessionaires are much more motivated by commercial greed and the pursuit of their companies’ social self-legitimation than by imperatives related to heritage preservation’ (Busetto, 2014: 400).

Driven by a persistent interest among viewers in television memory and its historical programming (dos Santos Neto and Bressan Junior, 2022, 2023a, 2023b; Cajazeira and de Souza, 2020), private networks, led by Globo, have ventured into streaming services to capitalise on what Bressan Júnior (2019) has termed ‘tele-affective memory’, a ‘spectators’ desire to return to the past, and the experiences and sentiments aroused by this revisitation’ (dos Santos Neto and Bressan Junior, 2023a: 13). This viewer fascination with re-watching past programmes has prompted even public networks, such as São Paulo’s TV Cultura, to consider monetising their content as part of their efforts to achieve financial and political autonomy. While we acknowledge the validity of networks charging for commercial use of their archival materials, we raise the question of potential collaboration between private and public entities to enhance access for citizens and researchers who do not intend to exploit archive images and sounds for profit. By facilitating creative, educational and cultural uses of television archives, networks could help ensure the fundamental right of access to content that has previously aired. This right is already recognised for newspapers, as exemplified by the Digital Brazilian National Library, which offers an efficient and free search engine that supports online research of newspaper content (BNDigital). The same goes for books at public libraries and for film at cinematheques, yet no institution does it for video and television.

When discussing the fluid boundaries between public and private spaces in relation to television digital archives, a conceptual issue must also be addressed. We contest the assertions made by some scholars who have characterised Globo’s recent efforts to make its historical programming available via streaming services as ‘digital archives’ (Cajazeira and Souza, 2020; see also dos Santos Neto and Bressan Junior, 2022, 2023b). The networks’ transition to streaming services is often interpreted as a step towards enhanced ‘spectator autonomy’ within the context of what Henry Jenkins calls ‘participatory culture’ (2009; see also Lipovetsky and Serroy, 2009). It may even be suggested that Globoplay functions as ‘a site of memory’ (dos Santos Neto and Bressan Junior, 2023b: 194), in the sense that the platform stimulates viewers’ engagement with past titles, allowing for potential revisitation of the content that the network chooses to showcase. However, an archive entails the preservation of stable collections in a manner that ensures accessibility, regardless of the volume of traffic each piece of content receives. It necessitates stable rules of consultation and availability that extend beyond the commercial imperatives, typical of private streaming platforms.

A comprehensive examination of algorithmic curation in streaming platforms and its implications in how spectators might choose what to watch exceeds the scope of this article. Nevertheless, it is important to emphasise that although the availability of historical television content on streaming platforms is very welcome, as it turns previously unavailable content accessible for those who are subscribers, it does not guarantee it will always be so. The commercial frameworks governing streaming distribution and the associated licencing agreements fundamentally oppose the principles of historical archiving. In order to understand the instability of video platforms, it is worth remembering that cultural film portals such as the Criterion Collection, or MUBI, are constantly renewing the materials they make available for their subscribers. Images and sounds can be heavy digital materials; they occupy a lot of space, and their availability is thus subject to quantitative comparative reports about the number of accesses a given archive has had. The impossibility of keeping everything in a commercial portal guides collection renewal. While it is indeed commendable that earlier television programmes are now more accessible than ever, ensuring the long-term availability of these materials necessitates a commitment to proper archiving practices.

In recent years, we have witnessed how past television titles, including those produced by the same parent company that makes them available through streaming, can abruptly vanish from the catalogue or be transferred to another streaming service for an additional fee. A notable example is Warner Discovery’s decision to remove several legacy titles from its streaming platform, Max, in an effort to reduce residual costs (Foreman and Chapman, 2023). The past five years in the streaming industry have illustrated that, contrary to earlier utopian visions suggesting continuous and convenient access to past television shows online, the mechanisms governing the availability of content – and the duration for which it remains accessible – are largely opaque and beyond the spectators control. Presently, streaming companies engage in both the acquisition of legacy content and the production of original titles as strategies to attract and retain viewers. Renewed interest in past television content has even justified the availability of original cuts of telenovelas, but this trend may not endure, raising important questions about the future of these titles.

To effectively archive both the past and present of television, it is important that such an enterprise is rooted in independent, public, stable and well-funded institutions. It is important to note that effective archival practices are not exclusive to public television companies. Consider, for instance, two public institutions that actively preserve their national audiovisual heritage: BFI in the United Kingdom and INA in France. These institutions, while subject to criticism, demonstrate how both public and private television entities can collaborate in their preservation efforts, thereby enhancing the safeguarding of cultural heritage.

In the United Kingdom, the initial steps toward transforming the BFI National Film Archive into a comprehensive television archive were not initiated by the BBC, but rather by commercial television companies, specifically the Independent Television Companies Association (ITCA). This association represented commercial and private television entities in the United Kingdom and provided the essential annual grants that enabled the BFI to acquire television programmes throughout the late-1960s and 1970s. Furthermore, when the BFI began implementing plans to systematically record public transmissions of television programming, it started by establishing agreements with commercial entities such as ITV and Channel 4. These agreements not only permitted the BFI to capture and preserve ‘off-air’ signals, but also financed the necessary technical infrastructure at the BFI National Archive’s Conservation Centre, inaugurated in 1985. This facility currently records ‘off-air’ broadcasts from 18 British television channels, utilising a state-of-the-art system for digital indexing and organisation of the material. It was not until the 1990s that the National Archive entered into agreements to capture signals from BBC channels, following its designation as the national television archive under the Broadcasting Act of 1990. This underscores the potential for effective public-private partnerships in the preservation of national television heritage (for more on how the BFI preserves British television, see Kerrigan et al., 2023).

In the French context, the situation is more complex. Established in 1974, the Institut national de l’audiovisuel (INA) initially functioned as a commercial entity responsible for retransmitting or selling archived material from the Office de Radiodiffusion Télévision Française. However, following the enactment of France’s 1992 Legal Deposit Law, the INA began to receive programmes from private French radio and television networks, leading to the creation of the Inathèque in 1995. This secondary archive is accessible to researchers and students and, as of 2014, contained approximately 971,000 hours of television programming (Busetto, 2014: 385-387). Given that early television broadcasts in France were recorded on film, these archives provide valuable documentation of early television history. This public-private collaboration, mandated by specific legislation, has not only contributed to reducing the costs associated with archive organisation and maintenance but has also enhanced public access to television archives through branches of France’s National Public Library, albeit with some restrictions on access.

In France, accessing the INA’s streaming service requires the payment of a fee, and consultation of their onsite archive necessitates specific credentials, which can be obtained online, permitting access within the public library’s Inathèque area. In contrast, the British context offers a more facilitated approach to access, with ongoing efforts to enhance public accessibility to these archives, albeit often partially and sometimes limited to educational institutions. The BBC has developed several archive platforms, including the BBC Archives website, which provides access to thousands of curated extracts from their film and television archive, despite much of the material being subject to geolocation restrictions. Additionally, the BBC Programme Index offers listings of BBC broadcasts from 1923 to 2009, and the History of the BBC project presents comprehensive information regarding the corporation’s history. The British Film Institute (BFI) also provides various online platforms for archive access, such as the BFI Player, which features both free and subscription-based content drawn from the National Archive; the Institute’s YouTube channel; the BFI Mediatheque, which allows for in-person access to materials; and the BFI Replay, a free-to-access digital archive exclusively available to UK public libraries, serving as a comprehensive resource that encompasses different regional archives alongside the National Archive.

Both archives undoubtedly merit discussion concerning the nature of national heritage, the colonial and racial narratives they may reinforce, and how they might more accurately reflect the evolving identities of their respective nations. Nonetheless, these institutions, alongside their European counterparts, serve as thought-provoking models for countries such as Brazil, where access to television archives remains limited. Any proposed solutions, however, must be carefully adapted to the unique conditions and configurations of local context.

YouTube and amateur archiving

In comparison to the French and British models of public audiovisual archiving, Brazil’s decentralised, monetised, fragmented and challenging television archives present significant limitations for scholarly research on Brazilian television. While the European frameworks facilitate flourishing research into their national television legacies, Brazil’s initiatives are limited and sparse (Busetto, 2014: 401-402). There is a systematic deficiency of properly preserved and catalogued television archives, with the few existing resources primarily locked behind paywalls associated with commercially driven access models, subject to the fluctuating demands of perceived consumer preferences. Furthermore, networks predominantly offer only their own produced content and programming through their streaming services. Materials such as advertisements, vignettes and public service announcements – along with a myriad of other materials outside of original programming – are not only inaccessible but are also unarchived. Additionally, there is no established protocol for accessing the networks’ printed documentation, which details the production and development of their programming, representing an invaluable resource for media scholars.

In the absence of sufficient support from networks and public institutions, television researchers and enthusiasts are actively salvaging available materials, often by digitising old domestic VHS tapes of original programming and uploading images of television history to YouTube for public viewing. One notable enthusiast operates the ‘Baú da TV Brasileira’ YouTube channel, or ‘Brazilian TV Treasure Trove’ (Baú da TV). With over 54,000 subscribers and more than 400 uploaded videos, this channel provides a diverse array of content, ranging from news stories and commercials to vignettes and segments of episodes. The channel organises its videos into thematic playlists, encompassing categories such as music, arts, sports and news, as well as playlists dedicated to the history of Brazilian television and defunct networks like TV Tupi, TV Excelsior and TV Manchete. This channel represents just one example of a broader movement; numerous other channels, such as ‘Tevelharia’ (Tevelharia) and ‘Arquivo Marquezini’ (Arquivo Marquezini), similarly endeavour to bring family-and-friend recordings out of obscurity, revitalising them for audiences on the internet.

These DIY initiatives not only enhance the materials available for research but also offer alternative perspectives on television memory. However, in our opinion YouTube cannot be regarded as a ‘digital democratic archive’, where the archive itself is created by ‘user-creators’ (Gracy, 2007: 194; see also McKee, 2011; Burgess and Green, 2009; Hildebrand, 2007). Firstly, YouTube operates not as a streaming service created by a media company, but as a social network where users upload content. Its data is not stored or preserved within a specific archive; instead, YouTube derives from millions of users, any of whom may remove their content at any time. Furthermore, most of these users do not hold the copyright for the materials they upload, leading to frequent removals of videos by networks and independent producers.

Television fans and enthusiasts play a vital role in uploading and thus preserving copies of their favourite programmes; in so doing, they indicate a widespread interest in making more television programming accessible. Moreover, their collections highlight a demand for materials that are not made available by the networks, such as commercials and vignettes. However, fans posting practices might also operate similarly to streaming companies making past programmes available: whatever is most popular, or most aligned with the taste of the DIY archivist, ends up getting saved. As media scholars, we advocate for proper, public, stable and available archives of television materials of all kinds, regardless of their popularity or purposed quality. Unfortunately, we are far from anything of the sort.

When considering the dial as a limited public resource that networks compete for, and authorities regulate and manage, it becomes evident that broadcast content represents a matter of public interest. We may posit that the act of archiving television content could foster a greater sense of collective responsibility among commercial networks, potentially leading to broadcast content that is more engaging and attuned to cultural criteria. The activities of Brazilian television collectors on YouTube suggest that both networks and public institutions could take more proactive steps in archiving and democratising Brazilian television, embracing a broader vision that extends beyond merely commercialising ‘legacy content’. This continual neglect may be interpreted as partly stemming from a sense of disdain toward content associated with the so-called ‘lowest tier’ of the culture industry, which can also be interpreted as a broader contempt for the education and cultural preferences of individuals who cannot afford, or choose not to engage with, so-called higher-quality entertainment.

Conclusion

Through this brief overview of the current state of Brazilian television archives, particularly focussing on private networks collections and on the country’s largest television network, Globo, and its streaming platform, Globoplay, we aim to underscore what we perceive as the most significant challenge facing television scholarly research in Brazil: the necessity of conceptualising television beyond a ‘legacy content’ framework. Although these networks are concessionaires of public airwaves and, therefore, public service providers, the prevailing commercial mentality that has dominated the development of the Brazilian television industry often overshadows their civic and historical responsibility to preserve and make accessible the content they broadcast. As Brazilian television approaches its 75th anniversary, there is a burgeoning interest in its past, present and future archives. This call for accessible archives transcends academic circles, representing an asset for democratic control over the virtual landscape of moving images and sounds. Archives can stimulate creative viewership and the re-appropriation of content, stimulating media literacy and serving as powerful and sensitive repositories that can help us envision a more sustainable, democratic, diverse and innovative society.

Public investment in establishing public repositories for Brazilian television archives constitutes a secure and democratic method for enhancing public relations with memory and history. Various models currently employed in Europe illustrate that public-private partnerships for the preservation of national television heritage are feasible, with multiple approaches to implementation. Moreover, it is essential to invest in new, more intuitive means to access these materials, aligned with the contemporary online streaming era, as evidenced by the significant subscriber growth of Globoplay. Cultural institutions could collaborate in a kind of hub of archives, which would be accessible according to different procedures for profit or non-profit oriented productions. One potential avenue could involve adapting the role of BFI Replay as an umbrella for various regional archives to fit the Brazilian context, creating a public online hub that aggregates digitalised materials from private archives. Access could be limited to public institutions such as universities, libraries, the Cinemateca Brasileira and public museums of sound and image. Additionally, non-governmental organisations with specific artistic or activist collections, as well as independent producers, should be included in the structuring of a collaborative archival network that would encourage cross-collection research. These initial ideas, inspired by Eduardo Coutinho’s 2010 provocation, aspire not only to enrich the research on the history of television but also to enhance the creative and artistic potential for fostering solidarity and tolerance.