Remediating Yugoslav Television Heritage: Croatian Radio-Television (HRT) and Radio Television of Serbia (RTS)

The last two decades have been marked by an innovative shift in television distribution and reception practices as well as by the remediation of their audio-visual heritage in the new media archives. Within the European cultural and media space, these archives are often constituted when developing infrastructures of digital media platforms (VOD, OTT, streaming); remediating media texts (through digitizing, archiving and preservation of the audio-visual heritage); fostering television content interactivity (accessibility and visibility); and further influencing the European cultural diversity, connectivity and transnational networks. The aim of this paper is to navigate through the layers of the Yugoslav television heritage and digital archives constituted by the national broadcasting televisions in Serbia and Croatia. Our main focus is to explore the Yugoslav fiction series (with the Second World War narratives), distinctively seen as a remediated cultural heritage format that enables its viewers to have a facile interaction with the collective memory from the overall socialist past. This paper addresses the issue of remediation process from the analogue television programs into digital archives (databases, platforms, collections) as a bridging practice for the preservation of the Yugoslav television heritage (on-demand memory, history, knowledge).