BoB National is an off-air recording and media archive service which is available to BUFVC members holding an ERA+ license. This low cost tv scheduling service allows your University staff and students to record programmes scheduled to be broadcast over the next seven days as well as retrieving programmes from the last seven days of recorded channels.

The requestor will receive the programme after broadcast as a Flash Video file they can watch in a web page – in the same way as i-player. BoB National stores the recorded TV and Radio programmes in the archive and they are held indefinitely for all users to access.

The archive currently offers thousands of TV and radio programmes covering all genres and that number is set to rise as more universities join BoB National.

The BoB National Homepage showing latest additions and most popular playlists

BoB national offers all the great features traditionally associated with the BoB enterprise system; users can record programmes, watch programmes from the archive, create clips, search for programmes coming up in the next seven days by title or keyword, compile their favourite shows into playlists and share their playlists with others.

Accessing the system is easy, users sign up for an account with their university email address and they instantly receive a password which grants them access to the service. That’s all they will need to gain acess to begin scheduling recordings and accessing thousands of programmes and playlists.

BoB National is a collaboration between Cambridge Imaging Systems, the BUFVC (who coincidentally first coined the term ‘BoB’ – Box of broadcasts when the first system was commissioned back in 2000) and Bournemouth University's ‘Centre for Excellence in Media Practice’.