TSR - Télévision Suisse Romande

The TSR record has been added on March 2004. The TSR answers are not accessible through the "Search by question" interface.

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

• TSR - Télévision Suisse Romande
• Françoise Clement, cheffe de Documentation et Archives
• 20, quai Ernest-Ansermet
• CH-1211 GENEVE 8
• francoise.clement@tsr.ch

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 (Swiss national Television, French speaking part)

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

• Two fully digital newsrooms
• Tape: Beta Digital, SX, BetaSP, DVCPro

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

• 16 mmm Film : ~ 57.000
• U-matic : ~ 8.000
• Maz : ~ 24.000
• Beta SP : 160.000
• SX : ~ 1.000
• Beta Digital: ~2.500
• DVCPro: ~1.000
• VHS: ~ 35.000

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

• Yes, we are in a project of digitisation of the archives and introduction of a MAM-system for the whole production

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 analyse MAM? If so, who is in the group? And, how long has the group been exploring MAM.

• Project group with members from IT engineering department, archives department, members of programs (producers, journalists, etc.) and project managers

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

• 2 years for the first part to be developed, the other productions (not all of them) within 5 years

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?

• Mainly internal resources concerning the collect of needs. But we have organised lots of visits, contacts, etc. In addition we have taken on external consultants on specific topics.

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

• Not decided yet (apart from digital newsroom)

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 you way back to the archives? Which is, for you the best option and why?

• The news and sport production is already digital. We must replace the actual video-archive-database but we will start from content creation and production needs but the archival issues will be present during this process.

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.)

• Program production (quality and commodity)
• Long term content preservation
• Online services and commercial issues (tracability, importance of information about future re-use, commercialisation, conditions, etc.)

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

• Costs
• New workflow design, new job definitions
• Open questions relating to standards

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?

• Buying an MAM system with standard components
• We do not have the internal specialists and money for developing an in-house solution
• But we need to interface the MAM solution with others internal and sometimes not very open systems…

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

• No, a lack of understanding concerning the specific requirements of the database-part (documentation, descriptive issues, etc.)

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?

• Too much products focus on the production side, and not on specific archive's requirements

6. Have you visited any MAM installation, which impressed you favourably impressed? Where? Why?

• Yes, very important to get a clear picture of what exists, what fits to our needs, to check the operability of systems and their interoperability…

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

• No yet decided

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

• Our choice has not been made yet. First we have to make sure our customers/users understand what technology can offer today, then make the list of their requests/needs, and check what we can afford to get a solution acceptable for the users and in the future.

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

• Not yet, we will have to standardize the metadata at least within our company and with the other companies of Swiss TV, and also with other TV in order to allow exchanges of contents.
• SMPTE, EBU, Dublin Core

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

• Not decided yet

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

• Not decided yet

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

• We will preserve them as a long time as they are in good state and find appropriate archives spaces and personal whose abilities is preservation and not broadcast.

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

• MPEG 2 4:2:2

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)

• Not yet defined

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

• All new production will stay in a robot, and probably part of the "old" production, selected with very specific and severe criteria.

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

• Probably data tape

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

• Same as production

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

• MPEG1 1.5 Mbits

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

• Not yet decided

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

• Not yet defined, but the most important is to be able to trace the material that has been used, in order to check its use and prevent misuse or abuse of the same documents. Tracabilility is a very important part of the system, since it allows the archives department to prove its role and justify a R.O.I.