RAI - Radiotelevisione Italiana

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1. Name of Company/Address/Contact person e-mail

• RAI - Radiotelevisione Italiana
• Viale Mazzini, 14 – 00195 Roma – Italy
• Via Col di Lana 8 – 00195 Roma – Italy
• Rossetto@rai.it

2. What is its area of activity? (free over the air TV broadcaster, cable TV channel, independent content producer, etc...)

• Free over the air TV broadcaster 3 channels, satellite 3 channels, pay TV 7 channels

3. Type of production media format currently being used? (tape, which format?)

• Betacam SP, BVU ¾, D2, IMX

4. What media formats has your company used and what formats are currently held in your archives? Approximate quantity?

• Video :
  • 2 inch : 34.700 items
  • 1 inch: 134.300 items
  • ¾ : 330.000 items
  • Betacam SP : 327.000 items
  • VHS : 21.000 items
  • D2 :140.000 items
• Film :
  • 35 mm negative : 3.470 items
  • 16 mm negative : 65.345 items
  • 35 mm print : 21.275 items
  • 16 mm print : 465.615 items
  • 35 mm SEPMAG : 21.761 items
  • 16 mm SEPMAG : 224.162 items

5. Are you or your company/organization currently working on any MAM initiative (either studies or actual implementation)?

• Yes

6. Who is/was leading the study for a MAM implementation (IT Department, Engineering Department, Library Department, other?…)? Has your company established a “group” to analyze MAM? If so, who is in the group? And, how long has the group been exploring MAM.

• The group about MAM is composed by ICT Department (Information Communication Technology), CRIT Department (Center Research and Innovation Technology) and Archive Technological Support

7. How long has your company/will your company's media asset management implementation program been in existence?

• Since 1997

8. Have you used, or are you using, internal resources or external consults (or company which provides consulting services) to formulate a MAM strategy? Why did you decided to use the consults?

• We use internal resources and external consults

9. What roll-out plan will/did your company adopt in implementing a MAM solution? Will/Did you implement MAM it in phases, all at once?

• We implement it in phases by department

10. Will/Did you start your MAM strategy from the archives and march up to content creation, or will/did you start from content creation and work your way back to the archives? Which is, for you, the best option and why?

• We have a selection policy for preservation of Digital Information ; we preserve the material transmitted daily and documented and recover the historical material (50.000 hours per year)

11. Based on your studies thus far, what are the main benefits for your company/organization to implement a MAM solution? (long term content preservation, program production, play out cache, etc.)

• Long term content preservation and program production

12. What are the obstacles/challenges that must be overcome in order to implement a MAM solution (cultural change, cost, ROI, retraining etc…)?

• Cost and time

13. Are/Did you considering buying the MAM solution as a closed package or do/did you co-develop it with a vendor? Are/Did you consider developing an in-house MAM system? Please explain?

• We are developing an in-house MAM system, it’s the Multimedia Catalogue

14. Do you think that the various MAM players today on the market clearly understand your requirements?

• We have always found on the market solutions for a single problem, never solutions for the whole system

15. Is there a feature that you feel is important to your business and that few or none of the various MAM vendors is currently addressing? What is it?

16. Have you visited any MAM installation which impressed you favorably impressed? Where? Why?

• Other Broadcasters come to visit our Mutimedia Catalogue

17. Are you partenering with any company (ies) to implement a media asset management system? Please explain the role of each company.

• We cooperate with EBU and other broadcasters like BBC, INA, ORF and ZDF

18. Please explain why you selected companies to partner with? (Local presence and support? Cost? Suite of features available?...)

• Common objectives and experience in the matter

19. Did you standardize the metadata within your company? Are you following the standards of a specific body (SMPTE, EBU, ...)?

• EBU-P/META for B2B
• A Metadata Standard – MADL for the internal workflow company

20. How does your company plan to preserve the content? Will you be copying it to data tape or to a digital videotape format?

• We use data tape and digital video tape both

21. Will you be creating low quality proxies and storyboards during the digitalization of the media to be preserved? Will you be using DVD, CD-ROM or Hard Disks to store these proxies and storyboards?

• We use Hard Disk and data tape to store low quality assets

22. What will you do to the original videotape once it has been copied to the new digital medium?

• We place them in the archives

23. What level/type of compression is considered adequate so as to be used to archive material?

• IMX format in broadcasting quality, MPEG4 for browsing
• MP3 for audio browsing, digital non compressed for audio broadcasting.

24. What is the timeframe for completing the cataloguing of the material? (i.e. 20K hours in 6 months, 100K hours in 12 months, 250K hours in 2 years. etc)

• 88k hours in 12 months

25. Which content stays on-line (in a robot) and which one is stored in a shelf?

26. What type of media is going to be used for permanent storage (i.e. data tape, DVD, Video Tape, etc…)?

• Video Tape

27. What type of video compression is going to be used for HQ assets. The same as the production servers? Higher compression ratios?

• IMX format

28. What type of video compression is going to be used for low resolution proxies (MPEG-1, MPEG-4, etc…)?

• MPEG-4 and MP3 at 200Kb for second

29. What kind of back-up policies (mirroring, etc..)?

• Mirroring

30. Will repurposed material also become part of the archive?