  The German Broadcasting Archive (DRA) maintains the cultural heritage of
radio and television broadcasts of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR).
The uniqueness and importance of the video material stimulates a large
scientific interest in the video content. In this paper, we present an
automatic video analysis and retrieval system for searching in historical
collections of GDR television recordings. It consists of video analysis
algorithms for shot boundary detection, concept classification, person
recognition, text recognition and similarity search. The performance of the
system is evaluated from a technical and an archival perspective on 2,500 hours
of GDR television recordings.
