Yle and NOA Celebrating 20+5 Years Anniversary

In 2003, the Finnish public broadcaster Yle faced an ambitious task: to digitize its audio archive. With several hundred thousand items stored on DAT, CD, and tape, the task seemed insurmountable. However, Yle was determined to preserve its rich audio heritage and turned to NOA, an emerging archive technology solution specialist from Vienna, for help. NOA delivered a digitization system for the audio archive based on jobDB, NOARecord, N6000 AD converters, DB Scripter, and MediaButler which allowed Yle to successfully digitize its entire archive.

Back then, after Austrian Mediathek in Vienna, Yle was the first international institution which decided for NOA technology. Even today, there are still people remembering the service technicians from Yle returning from the Yle audio laboratory with a beaming smile on their face after having analyzed the quality of the N6000 AD converters, asking: “How come that NOA has an AD converter with 96kHz which can do 123dB dynamics? Even the most expensive converters we have here do not come even close to these values!”

The heart of this project however was not about speed but about quality. The digitization process allowed Yle to meet its quality standards with no compromises. With no high-speed dubbing but well-repaired tapes, excellent sonic quality, and coherent metadata correction and annotation, Yle could achieve the best possible quality for their archive. Yle could use the system at the pace of available resources, and this meant that Yle could afford to spend additional time to realize timelines with on occasion only one full-time employee operating the system - and still achieve excellent results.

The success of Yle's audio digitization project led to a strong partnership between Yle and NOA, which has lasted now for over 20 years. In 2018, Yle celebrated a significant milestone in its collaboration with NOA; it had been 15 years since NOA first delivered a digitization system for Yle's audio archive. And in the same year, the two companies set off on yet another success story: Yle had added a complete setup for digitization of its 120,000 Betacam, Digibeta, and 1"C video tapes - and once again, the complete system was delivered by NOA.

The addition of the video digitization system was a significant achievement for Yle. The jobDB software enabled Yle to manage digitization of its video archive effectively, and FrameLector and QualityChecker allowed to efficiently enhance the video content's quality. MediaButler was also used in a new and unique way to automate the video digitization process in terms of audio track handling and video level correction. Nearing its final months of production, Yle was able to successfully digitize almost the entire collection with the help of NOA's archiving solutions.

In conclusion, the 20+5 years anniversary of the collaboration between Yle and NOA in 2023 is a testament to the power of long-term partnerships built on trust, collaboration, and innovation serving as an excellent example of how organizations can work together to achieve great success, even in challenging projects such as digitizing entire audiovisual archives. The two companies have worked together to achieve significant goals, preserving the rich audio and video heritage of Finland's public broadcaster. With technology constantly evolving, Yle and NOA will undoubtedly continue to innovate and collaborate to preserve history for future generations.