Case Study: BBC achieves instant, searchable access to nearly 2M archive assets and cuts content-access time from days to minutes with Elastic

BBC - Customer Case Study

The BBC faced a classic big-data search problem: decades of heterogeneous archive material — TV and radio programmes and rushes, film and tape, millions of photos, sheet music, documents, artworks and legacy kit — plus rich metadata, all stored across multiple systems. Editors needed fast, reliable access to that content for stories and apps, but finding and retrieving relevant assets could take days; rising content volumes and a push toward self‑service made the challenge more urgent.

BBC R&D built the Rewind Portal as a barely‑viable product and iterated it into production using the Elastic Stack for search, MongoDB for staging, a Node/Angular web stack, and a suite of enrichment services (speech‑to‑text, face recognition, OCR, concept extraction) and media processors. The result: time‑to‑access dropped from days to minutes, previously siloed material was unlocked for a wide internal user base, and audience engagement jumped — the portal indexes roughly 1.98 million archive assets and has driven over 20 million archive‑inspired actions, 10M+ page views and 2.3M unique users.

BBC

Michael Satterthwaite

Senior Product Manager