Following an intensive digitisation process of their archives, M6 launched 2015 a B2B portal to expose their legacy production videos to potential business customers. Within five years, all the key objectives set in the original plan were reached, and the archive unit turned from a cost centre into a profit centre. What lessons were learnt from 7 years of operating such a content sales portal? What organisation was put in place? Today M6 is gearing up their approach by launching a new portal allowing it to expose and sell all media produced by the group (audio, pictures, etc.). The aim is to double the revenue and activate a new monetisation stream of their legacy assets. The session will cover the initial project M6VideoBank in 2016, our seven years of experience, and the improvement of the portal and its new version with the Perfect Memory technology.

Louis Matignon has over 9 years of international experience in the broadcasting industry, where he has managed global software and service portfolios as well as teams of engineers and pre-sales architects. Today Chief Revenue Officer at Perfect Memory, he applies himself to generate the maximum value for its clients.

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After nearly 25 years of experience in the audiovisual sector (at VOYAGE, TV5Monde and the last 15 years in the dubbing department of M6, in charge of products follow-up), Sandra Koch now turns to the Documentation Department, which is aiming for strong international deployment via its future M6MEDIABANK portal. She is trilingual and passionate about everything related to archives and new technologies.

The covid crisis motivated ERT Archives to transform itself in the past two years not only by adjusting to the new distance-working conditions but also by updating and adopting a MAM that quickly became the basic tool for the ERT S.A. workflow operations (Dalet). Within two years, ERT S.A. as a whole transformed into a fully digital working environment, and specifically ERT Archives are undergoing a considerable transformation with a digitization program of more than 200.000 beta tapes that is about to begin. The challenges are many, and the lessons to be learned are equally important: How is the sustainability of an Archive maintained while its primary goal is to facilitate the broadcaster’s day-to-day needs? How can a broadcasting MAM be optimized and customized to serve as an archive’s MAM? What is the cost of speed of operations? How are Archival requirements prioritized? How can planning solve digital storage issues, and how can training ensure a minimum of Metadata quality standards? The presentation will explain the 2-year timeline of this transformation and its technical aspects, milestones and results, prospects and lessons. It will also describe ERT Archives’ new digitization program and discuss the challenges and issues that need to be addressed in order to optimize operations and maintain the Archives’ standards, along with the new roles that ERT’s Archivists are called upon to assume.

Komninos has a PhD in Communication and Mass Media Studies and works as Documentalist at the Department of Restoration, Digitization and Documentation of the ERT S.A., Hellenic Radio & Τelevision, Archives. He has a long experience in audiovisual archive research, study and cataloguing while collaborating with private audiovisual productions and major Greek audiovisual institutions such as Thessaloniki Film Festival, the Museum of Telecommunications of OTE, the Greek Film Archive, the Hellenic National Audiovisual Archive and of course ERT Achive.

At Sound & Vision in 2012, speaker labelling and, later in 2019, face recognition was implemented and hooked up to the broadcast archive in an effort to reduce time spent on manual annotation. Also, in the training of models and correction of the AI output, manual intervention by archivists is minimal.

At RTVE, the integration of massive automatically generated data only started in 2021 after some years of training. Since then, archivists have been involved in a complex process to discern the optimal application of these AI tools in our daily work and understand the overall impact on the archive.

In this presentation, RTVE & Sound & Vision will compare their use of AI and human annotation practices.

Virginia Bazán-Gil is Deputy Director of the TVE archive at RTVE, where she is in charge of innovation projects connected with automatic metadata creation and image recognition tools. As a member of the RTVE University of Zaragoza Chair, she is also involved with research on Speech Technologies, Natural Language processing, and Computer Vision applied to the AV archive. She is the Secretary General at FIAT/IFTA.

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Tim Manders works as an Information Advisor (Data Wrangler) at the Exploration Department of the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision. He is experienced in operationalising automatic annotation techniques, such as speaker labelling and face recognition, applied on daily ingest into the archive with the purpose of pinpointing fine-grained access points into our collection items.