Significantly reduce TV production times by creating an easily searchable repository containing 50 years’ worth of archived content with over 20 million assets.
RTVE has a video archive with over 50 years of television and radio footage. This consists of over 20 million assets that are critical to RTVE’s ability to produce and broadcast news in a timely manner. Juan de Meer, Chief Information Officer for RTVE, explains: “We are an always-on organization and information floods into us from all directions, at a rate of one million assets each year. Searching for the right content in this huge archive was tedious and time-consuming. The assets were captured in video, text, image, and audio, and they were spread across disparate systems, with different databases and programming languages. RTVE has embarked on a major digital transformation and, as part of that, we want to reduce the time it takes to produce TV and radio programs. A corporate-wide document management solution would help to serve the needs of our producers and journalists more effectively and quickly.”
RTVE is the largest audiovisual group in Spain broadcasting in the Spanish language. It offers access to different types of programs and to the institutional, social, cultural, and sporting events that are of interest to the public. RTVE manages six national TV channels, two international TV channels, and five radio channels. It also hosts Spain’s most visited website: www.rtve.es.
RTVE conducted extensive market research into the right solution to address video, image, audio and text data, and the tender was granted to a systems integrator to include IDOL as the corporate search solution. With IDOL’s support for several data types, and with a large variety of source connectors, IDOL helps index data quickly without disruption or relocation.
RTVE engaged with Micro Focus Professional Services to deliver this complex project. De Meer comments: “It was very difficult to take data from many disparate sources that has been collected over the last 50 years and index the information in a uniform way to make it easily searchable. We feel we need to preserve this slice of Spanish history for our citizens to enjoy and we relished the challenge to create a fully indexed information repository for our producers and journalists to leverage. Our staff are creative people, not particularly technical ones, and so we needed to make it user-friendly. It was essential that accurate and relevant results are returned as fast as possible. Micro Focus Professional Services managed all the integration points for us and created a fast and scalable IDOL system.”
If a journalist needs, for example, to find an image or footage of Fernando Alonso winning the Monaco Grand Prix, this needs to be at his fingertips. Same with a documentary producer looking fora specific clip of King Felipe or other relevant people. These types of searches could take hours, or even days, in the previous archive. With the new IDOL-driven system, results are returned in seconds, and the relevant asset can be quickly downloaded and edited into a new item for use in the news or other TV programs.
De Meer on how life has changed now that 50 years’ worth of footage is so easily accessible: “Our users love our IDOL system. There is so much more we can do and we are only just scratching the surface of the possibilities with IDOL. We want to further leverage the robust Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities more effectively within IDOL to learn from our data, and to identify key concepts and their relationships with other concepts within the repository. This will then deliver contextually relevant search results for our producers and journalists.”
All RTVE’s critical data sources, such as news, documentaries, radio etc. are now managed centrally irrespective of their format that could be video, audio, text, or image. The new content search ability has drastically reduced the time it takes to produce programs, as explained by De Meer:
Juan De Meer – CHIEF INFORMATION OFFICER
RTVE
He concludes:
Juan De Meer – CHIEF INFORMATION OFFICER
RTVE
