SONUMA Opens Up New Pathways for Belgian National Radio and TV Archive With NETIA Content Management System

Journalists and Producers Now Tapping Into More Than 120,000 Hours of Media Assets for Richer Program Content

CLARET, France -- Aug. 31, 2012 -- SONUMA, the subsidiary of Belgium's RTBF (Radio Télévision Belge Francophone) responsible for the digitization and commercialization of audiovisual archives, has given new life to the broadcaster's archives using the NETIA Content Management System (CMS). Since its installation of the NETIA system in 2011, SONUMA has digitized a substantial proportion of RTBF's 120,000-hour radio and television archive, giving the broadcaster's journalists, columnists, and technicians a far deeper and richer resource to use in their work. 

SONUMA uses NETIA CMS not only to preserve and manage RTBF's legacy of content on a variety of media, including VCR tape, DAT tape, LP, MD, 16mm film, and even 78rpm vinyl, but also to provide fine-grained access to the library for the hundreds of RTBF journalists who use it to enhance their daily output. To achieve the detailed and precise metadata structure required, SONUMA incorporated a range of metadata sources and formats, using NETIA CMS to overhaul the existing thesaurus and build in the facility for multilevel, multicriteria searches. 

"Our archive is a real goldmine, stretching back more than 80 years of radio and nearly 60 years of television, but digitizing all that material to preserve it for posterity is only part of the challenge. A critical part of the project is to provide high-quality access to it for the journalists and staff," said Eric Denis, IT manager at SONUMA. "The more sophisticated and powerful the search criteria you build in, the better use your people can make of your priceless assets." 

NETIA CMS provides a high degree of workflow automation in ingest, metadata logging, and output to streamline the process initiated when an item is ordered in a specific format. These automated processes have allowed SONUMA and RTBF to achieve highly efficient delivery of archived media to the company's partner news organizations. The broadcaster's website provides the general public with selections from the archive representing the history of radio and television in French-speaking Belgium, with a workflow that enables journalists to select the chosen material using the NETIA media asset management (MAM) module, provide a short summary and then post the content online.

The NETIA CMS organizes SONUMA's media management processes, harmonizes exchanges between different applications, handles prioritization across the system, and automates content distribution processes. To streamline content delivery itself, the CMS provides tools for content packaging, metadata tagging, and rights management, with workflow supervision guiding these processes. The system is fully integrated with RTBF's newsroom systems to provide journalists, directors, and producers with ready access to SONUMA's archived media.

"An archive of material that covers such a long period of broadcasting is a valuable historical resource in itself, and making it accessible to today's journalists and broadcasters gives fascinating new depth to the programs made today," said Amaury Orbaiceta Leoz, sales manager at NETIA. "With the detailed metadata structure SONUMA has been able to create with NETIA CMS, RTBF's journalists can now do more creative and informative work than ever before." 

More information about NETIA and its products is available at www.netia.com.

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About NETIA

NETIA, a GlobeCast company, is a leading provider of software solutions that enable efficient management and delivery of content to today's full array of media platforms. Relied on by more than 10,000 users in 200 installations in more than 40 countries, NETIA solutions allow content producers and owners to manage content from ingest to delivery, targeting multiplatform outlets including the Internet, VOD, IPTV services, and mobile devices. 

NETIA provides content management solutions to major radio and television brands and multimedia groups around the world. Clients include SBS and ABC in Australia, RAI Italy, France Telecom/Orange, MediaCorp Singapore, RTL France, Radio Globo in Brazil, RTM Malaysia, Radio France, the Associated Press, France Télévisions, TV Center Russia, and L'Équipe 24/24. NETIA has its headquarters in France, with offices in the United States, Paris, Rome, and Singapore, in addition to a global network of professional distribution partners.

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Image Caption: NETIA Content Management System (CMS)