TVC - Televisio de Catalunya

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

• Televisio de Catalunya, TVC
• Alícia Conesa
• aconesa.g@tvcatalunya.com

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

• BETACAM-SP (B-SP), BETACAM- DIGITAL (D-B), DVC-PRO

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

• 1" : 16.000
• 3/4" U : 2.000
• Betacam :19.000
• B-SP : 130.000
• D-B : 25.000
• DVC-PRO : 5.000

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

• We are in the implementation test phase

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.

• IT Department and Engineering Department are leading the project.
• But there is a group of validation with the participation of Library Department and news, sports and programs production.
• This group has been exploring different MAM systems for at least 6 months period.

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

• We are still in the test process.

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?

• In the process, there has been the participations of external consultants, but finally the project is realized by our internal resources, with the participation of different external partners.

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?

• Our project is to implement the system in consecutive phases

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 will start from content creation in one small area (international news) and then expand it to all news production and other production areas.
• From the archive point of view, the project is to start archiving in the digital system what it is already digitally created, and after, once the system has been tested and proved, expand the process digitalizing archive material.
• In our point of view, start with the creation and production process is the best option. So, when the archive enters the process, we will be sure that we are in the right way.
• Up to the moment, material in the archive is well preserved and catalogued, and completely searchable by our text database. So, we have not a pressure to change the archive system, other than the change in the production 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.)

• Benefits expected are:
  • facility for efficient and simultaneous access to material (production material and archive material) for newsroom and program production
  • and consequently, more capacity of production for different purposes
  • solution for a long term preservation

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

• Cost is the most important problem
• Cultural changes and changes in the roles of different actors (journalist, editors, archivists..) are also an important challenge, but if the system is performing well, and really makes our work easier, changes will be well accepted

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.

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

• The problem is that technology changes so fast, than you need an open system, that allows you to integrate new requirements and changes.
• Developing an in-house system may be more time consuming, but you are sure that you get what you need, and, what it is most important, you do not depend of a unique provider, and you can integrate solutions of different partners.

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?

• As far as we test them, we realized that different MAM systems are prepared to offer solutions to main problems, but to adapt them to our specific requirements can have a high price

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

• We have visited similar installations in Spain : Tele 5, Tele Madrid. We have learn a lot of them

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

• We have different partners that are technological providers of different elements of the system

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

• Cost, local presence, previous experiences …

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

• No, by the moment we are not following exactly any standard

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 plan copying it to data tape

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 have a system similar to Virage to extract key-frames. The key-frames are preserved in the data-base in hard disks. A low quality copy of the video itself in MPEG-1 is preserved also in hard disk.

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

• We have not yet started to copy material, but once we start, it will depend on the original medium. I suppose we will preserve also the tapes if the format is still in use, but once the format would be obsolete, we will destroy the tapes, as we do currently with the 1” or U.MATIC tapes once they are copied in a new format.

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

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.)

• We have not yet plane a time frame for digitalizing the archive. In any case, all the material held in the archive is already cataloged.

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

• It will depend on the future use of the material

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

• 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?

• Production and archive will share the same compression ratios.

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

• By the moment, MPEG-1.

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

• It depends on the material, but we will maintain the same policy we have for tapes.

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

• Yes, if it is part of a broadcasted program.