Czech film restoration

I've mentioned a couple of times before the fact that I used to listen to international broadcasters on short-wave radio back in the days when they were still using short-wave to broadcast. Nowadays, the ones that didn't close down their English-language services are mostly on the internet, so you have to download the broadcasts, although on the other hand you can find a particular program later if you should happen to miss it.

Such is the case with a report I heard from Radio Prague today about the state of film restoration in the Czech Republic. To put it simply, the state isn't particularly good, largely because it costs money to restore the films. Heck, there are a lot of films from Hollywood that could use restoration and, even though there's a lot more money in the US, it's often not economically viable to restore the films if very few people are going to buy them on DVD. Manufacture on demand can help, I suppose, but MOD releases are priced higher than others to compensate for the low volumes.

You can read the text of Radio Prague's report here, or download the MP3 file (I'm not certain how long the download link will remain active).