A Broadcast Archive: What Aired and When

A radio station accumulates thousands of hours of broadcast recordings over the years — interviews, music blocks, programs that haven't been indexed by content in a long time. Finding a specific interview or a topic mention is only possible if someone remembers roughly when it aired.

The same applies to a program still being prepped for air: raw interview recordings and takes for one episode are usually far more than what actually airs, and finding the right moment in them is the same task as going through an archive of past seasons.

Digercules transcribes recordings — aired or still in rough form — and structures them by topic, participant, and date — splitting each recording into per-speaker lines (who in the interview said exactly what) with timecodes, so you can find the fragment you need instead of relistening to the whole broadcast.

How it works

Processing runs either entirely on the client's own hardware, or — if that hardware isn't powerful enough — is delegated to a specific external machine over a closed peer-to-peer channel (not a public cloud): the compute is physically located in the Caucasus and Eastern Europe, the client is always told explicitly which machine and which jurisdiction is doing the processing, and only text/structured results come back — never the source files. Broadcast material stays under the same access and rights control — it's processed on your instruction, and the result is a text catalog with timecodes.

Transcribing speech at this scale isn't a hypothesis: 66,000+ hours of real audio recordings already processed on live archives.

Objections

"Broadcast recordings have rights attached, you can't just work with them" — processing doesn't publish or distribute the material; it creates an internal catalog for the station's own use. Questions about publication rights for fragments stay entirely on your side and aren't changed by processing.

"We have a broadcast log archive" — a broadcast log records what was supposed to air according to plan; Digercules works with what was actually recorded and aired, including unplanned moments.

"We need this for the current episode, not an archive" — processing works the same way on a current program's rough recordings as on an archive of aired episodes.

First contact

A pilot on one broadcast season's archive — a catalog with timecodes by topic and participant. The proposal should go to the station head or program director who makes decisions about the archive, not a line editor.