Memnon selected by Telefónica Servicios Audiovisuales as digitisation services provider for RTVE’s audiovisual archive
Memnon, the global content preservation and migration services provider and broadcast and audiovisual solutions specialist Telefónica Servicios Audiovisuales (TSA) have announced a partnership that will preserve more than 200,000 hours of content from Spanish public television archives.
TSA, a Telefónica Group company, is responsible for the project management, infrastructure supply and coordination of the audiovisual archive of Spain’s largest state-owned public media company, Radio-Televisión Española (RTVE), and has agreed to a three-year contract with Memnon to provide digitisation/migration services for an estimated 205,035 Betacam tapes. The tapes belong to RTVE’s divisions in 12 regional centres spread across the Spanish territory, as well as a production centre in the Canary Islands, and include approximately 198,220 hours of footage.
Memnon’s support will significantly accelerate the broadcaster’s efforts to migrate its extensive video archive. For RTVE, the project will result in greater efficiency in production and deliver significant savings in space and maintenance costs for assets with demanding conservation requirements. It will also facilitate access to and dissemination of this regional content and enable the use of Artificial Intelligence techniques such as voice transcription and automatic indexing for all digitised content.
Telefónica Servicios Audiovisuales will work with Memnon to ensure each step of the migration process is carried out to the highest quality and security standards. This includes selecting, packing, palletising and transporting the tapes from RTVE’s regional centres to Memnon’s media processing facility in Brussels. Telefónica is also responsible for RTVE’s infrastructure expansion to accommodate all the new content that will be digitised, such as providing extra hardware and software including servers, storage and MAM features.
TSA will provide additional infrastructure at Memnon’s facility to ease the integration with RTVE’s existing system. Additionally, TSA will supply both human and technical resources to verify files against tape information, enabling content to be standardised into RTVE’s existing format. This arrangement also allows for human quality checks to be carried out remotely.
Memnon will complete this project using a meticulously designed workflow solution that prioritises robotics, orchestration and automated tracking and reporting. Human intervention will also be strategically integrated at critical points throughout the process. The automated processes deliver substantial benefits in time efficiency, scalability and cost-effectiveness, while manual processes act as a safeguard, ensuring the integrity of the migrated files by imposing qualitative checks at key moments such as tape preparation and quality control. To achieve round-the-clock ingest and sustain optimal throughput efficiency, Memnon will employ a proficient and experienced team of media operators, working three-person shift rotations.
Alberto de Prada, Director of RTVE Documentary Fund said, “Through this project, RTVE completes the digitisation of the territorial centres’ video archives, guaranteeing the preservation of the collective memory of various autonomous communities. A total of 14 newly digitised archives are now incorporated into the RTVE Documentary Fund. The digitisation initiative of RTVE’s video archives, which initially involved Telefónica, has now reached its completion with the addition of Memnon, resulting in almost 600,000 hours of digitised content since the project began in 2008.”
“The historical archive of a public TV network like RTVE is the most valuable asset for a public media entity, as it captures the history of a country,” said Jose Luis García Cabrera, Director of Audiovisual Services and Platforms at Telefónica Servicios Audiovisuales. “That’s why choosing the right partner with extensive experience and background, like Memnon, that can provide the throughput to meet the requested time frames is so important in a project of this magnitude. This project is also an important milestone for TSA and is fully aligned with its portfolio of digital services focused on the audiovisual industry, where TSA is becoming a market leader in Spain.”
“We’re proud to have been selected by Telefónica to manage and facilitate the migration of RTVE’s invaluable media archive,” said Heidi Shakespeare, CEO at Memnon. “Telefónica required a single provider capable of executing RTVE’s content preservation strategy without compromising the integrity or accessibility of the content throughout the project, and Memnon proved to be the vendor capable of delivering this breadth of service. We’re looking forward to working in close partnership with Telefónica to continue RTVE’s preservation and conservation efforts.”
