A Long-standing Collaboration to Transform Archiving Workflows @RTVS Slovakia - World Day of Audiovisual Heritage.

A technology partnership narrated by Vladimir Hübner, ex-Technical Director of RTVS and currently Project Manager at NOA, and Roman Sk?ivánek, technical director at RTVS.

NOA has been working with Radio and Television Slovakia (RTVS), the largest and only public radio and television broadcaster in Slovakia, since 2009 to modernize its archiving workflow. Many of the successful projects still continue until today, currently being overseen by Roman Sk?ivánek, the broadcaster’s technical director in charge of the company’s archive.

Like most other broadcasters, RTVS spends most of its time, efforts and budgets on the production of content, its distribution and reuse. However, one of the most complex and most integrated systems in the production chain of RTVS is the digital archive. Why? The reason is of course quite simple – most of the programs received by today’s radio listeners and television viewers come from the broadcasters’ media archives. Because all content is archive content…

Even though archiving is not the core business of broadcasters, the partnership between NOA and RTVS clearly shows how essential and beneficial it is to work with trusted partners that can help media houses efficiently transform their archiving workflows with cutting-edge technology. Now that digitization is almost finished, time has come for RTVS to start preparing for the future.

How it all started

Back in 2009, Slovak Radio realized quite early that it was imperative to start an archive preservation project to protect the vast legacy content that has been stored in its archive since 1926. With production quickly transitioning into file-based workflows, the importance of the archive system in the bigger scheme of things had been quickly recognized. Many points had been considered, many specific targets set and many challenges identified.

To avoid complications and ensure maximum success, ‘a reliable and experienced partner’ had to be found. That’s where NOA stepped in. A project was set up to build a mid-scale digitization factory with a scalable asset management system, workflow engine, 12 different input channels, and a high-end storage system. Archive-related business procedures were designed and the system has been integrated with the then playout and planning system NETIA (since then replaced by SEPIA). With a strong partner on board, Slovak Radio was able to start a slow but very important process of educating and changing the minds of radio professionals…

In 2011, Slovak Radio and Slovak Television were merged into Radio and Television Slovakia (RTVS), and in 2015 the radio archive system was extended to cover the video part as well. A separate video digitization facility was set up for analog and digital SD carriers (betacam, digibeta, 1”C etc.), book and document scanning, photo digitization and restoration, all driven by powerful workflow engines, transcoders and quality checkers. Together, RTVS and NOA have built an enterprise-grade archive system that is fully integrated into the broadcaster’s ecosystem, processing media and metadata on a 24/7 basis, with more than 15,000 files a week.

The Present

Today, some 13 years since the project began, RTVS’ central digital archive contains digital versions of most of the legacy archive, but digitization still continues. This central archive holds hundreds of thousands of digitized items and is an integral part of all radio and television production workflows in five regional sites all over Slovakia. The ever-growing complexity of the production ecosystem puts a lot of pressure on the stability and reliability of the chosen technology, its interfaces and advanced integration features.

With digitization almost finished, RTVS’ original concerns about designing and selecting the right technical solution, its capacity, unification of video and audio formats, basic features of the digital asset management system, are slowly but surely being replaced by new targets and requirements. Topics of the day are cost efficiency, safety of digitized content and of legacy carriers, support for home-office access, remote production and new non-linear distribution output formats, and capabilities to store supplementary content in the archive.

Solving these present challenges one-by-one, brick-by-brick, allows RTVS to be more confident and future oriented. NOA is pleased to be a major player in this story for the benefit of not only RTVS but of all mankind.

The Future

Finally, the CTO and his team are able to look to identify trends for the next 10 to 15 years.

With all media content safely digitized and preserved, the importance of the legacy archive will diminish and RTVS, just like other broadcasters, will begin to get rid of their carrier collections. “Broadcasters who missed the train will rely on third-party digitization services even more heavily…and they should reserve a bigger budget,” says Sk?ivánek.

The organization sees the following important areas to consider in the coming years:

·????????The importance of metadata will grow, creating more automation, which removes the human factor and includes AI-driven techniques like speech-to-text analysis, speaker diarization or picture and scene recognition.

• Metadata models will adapt to production needs even more.
• The volume of media content produced worldwide, along with the number of available communication and distribution channels will grow exponentially. It will result in the requirement to support multi-format media exports targeting specifically non-linear distribution platforms.?
• Remote productions and remote access to content will become the norm, with archive systems rapidly moving into the cloud (at least partially).
• New security challenges will arise together with a new way of archiving content, bringing improvement to archives physical security in the meaning of geo-redundant solutions.
• Responsiveness and adaptability of archive vendors will become key for their success, even for their survival.
• High content volumes and high profit targets of media producers and distributors will put a lot of pressure on efficiency, including asset management systems and archives. Scaling and constant adaptation will become every broadcaster’s nightmare.

With troubled times ahead strong partnerships like the one between NOA and RTVS will shape the future. NOA is proud to be the first-choice partner for many broadcasters who choose to build that future by preserving their past and their culture first.