History
TVARK was founded in the dial-up era, as a one-man hobby site called "Television Ark" on 8 November 1998. At that time, there were just a few pages containing a handful of low-resolution clips that were easy to download but were smaller to look at than an average postage stamp. Over the years, the clips and images grew in size and quantity. The site expanded and was run entirely as a hobby by an eight-man team, with updates and additions made whenever time permitted. In December 2005, they absorbed the remains of SchoolsTV.com, a website dedicated to television programming for schools. The site is dedicated to the founder's late mother, Valerie Hackett.
During the summer of 2006, it was announced on their home page that they were having a summer break and would relaunch the site in the future. Unfortunately, higher resolution copies of previous clips were never made. The site relaunched on 25 December 2006 with very limited content. The relaunch saw a few better quality clips put into a new download system in an effort to prevent hotlinking and preserve bandwidth. This proved very unpopular as clips took much longer to view, especially for those with slower Internet connections. In addition, the relaunch saw the addition of a semi-transparent watermark (DOG) to new clips added to the site, in order to discourage "web snatching" of clips. Despite this, clips from TVARK have appeared on other sites, notably YouTube.
In July 2009, TVARK announced the end of RealMedia used on the site, with videos now using Flash streaming in H.264/MPEG-4 AVC. The service called TVARK iNTERACTIVE will include user accounts, commenting on videos and video statistics.
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