Industry: Media
Region: CEE/Austria
Headquarters: Vienna
Company size: 3,000 employees
“The seamless integration of all process steps in the workflow is a prerequisite for continuous output, which we achieve regularly and reliably. The Digital Migration project is a strategic investment for future ORF programs and for Austria’s cultural memory.”
Mag. Herbert Hayduck
ORF Head of Documentation and Archives
For Österreichischer Rundfunk (ORF), the Austrian national public service broadcaster, it was time to end the costly and unproductive cycle of continual media format migrations.
The background story will be familiar to any established media company. Since the 1960s, ORF has continually transferred content from outdated media formats while adding up to 50 hours of new material every day. This archive presents clear operational challenges. It occupies significant space and is difficult to browse; tape formats become superannuated and physical processes for accessing content are slow, risky and expensive.
With Atos’ help, ORF is migrating 600.000 video tapes to digital storage, bringing speed, ease and efficiency while preserving national heritage.
The challenge
The ORF multimedia archive contains well over one million hours of video content. Around 30% of this was stored in IMX or DigiBeta formats. The company’s challenge was to:
- Turn the physical tape archive into a file-based resource.
- Reduce physical volume requirements of the traditional archive space.
An initial tranche of 300,000 hours of content – or 600,000 individual tapes – required transfer to file format.
The solution
Atos implemented a dedicated project team to accompany the implementation of “DiMi” (Digital Migration project) from the very beginning. ORF benefits from our end-to-end approach. Our Competence Center specialists in Vienna, together with our partner NOA, support our customers throughout the entire project, from consulting and project management to quality control and digitized content assurance.
Business benefit
The content transferred is already benefiting both program makers and social and scientific historians and academics, from whom this material was previously all but hidden:
- Load reduction on existing archival requirement, with current standards as a sustainable platform for future use.
- For both program makers and viewers alike, easy access to content search and display becomes a routine expectation.
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