Customer stories

RTVE Spain logoRTVE Spain

Public broadcaster accelerates multimedia data search and retrieval across 20M+ assets from days to seconds with OpenText™ IDOL™

RTVE Spain logo

About RTVE (Radio Televisión Española)

RTVE is the national public broadcaster of Spain. Established in 1956, it operates television and radio services, delivering a variety of programs, including news, entertainment, cultural content, and educational shows.

Person talking in mic
  • Population served:
    47.62 Million

Summary

Challenges

  • Searches in a 50-year video archive were cumbersome.
  • Diverse assets lacked efficient searchability.
  • Traditional processes hindered timely content production.

Solution

  • Streamlined archive searches.
  • Created a user-friendly index for diverse assets.
  • Accelerated TV and radio content production.

Results

  • Reduced search time by 90%
  • Enhanced content accessibility
  • Revolutionized production efficiency

Challenges

  • Efficiency was hampered by slow searches in a vast 50-year video archive
  • Diverse assets needed a user-friendly index for efficient searchability
  • Traditional searches hindered timely TV and radio content production

Before the implementation of the IDOL unstructured data analytics platform, RTVE had faced challenges in managing a vast video archive spanning over 50 years and containing more than 20 million assets. The process of locating specific content was characterized by its time-consuming and cumbersome nature, attributed to the presence of disparate systems and formats. The diverse nature of assets, including video, text, image, and audio, distributed across various systems with different databases and programming languages, had posed a significant hurdle. The imperative to create a uniform, user-friendly index for efficient searchability was crucial to overcoming this challenge. Additionally, the traditional archive search process was characterized by its time-intensive nature, taking hours or even days. This hindered the timely production of content for TV and radio programs, necessitating a faster and more streamlined solution for journalists and producers to access relevant media assets for news and other programs.

Juan de Meer, chief information officer for RTVE, explained, “We are an always-on organization and information floods into us from all directions, at a rate of one million assets each year. Searching for the right content in this huge archive was tedious and time-consuming. The assets were captured in video, text, image, and audio, and they were spread across disparate systems, with different databases and programming languages. RTVE has embarked on a major digital transformation and, as part of that, we want to reduce the time it takes to produce TV and radio programs. A corporate-wide document management solution would help to serve the needs of our producers and journalists more effectively and quickly.”

Person looking video footage

RTVE has embarked on a major digital transformation and, as part of that, we want to reduce the time it takes to produce TV and radio programs. A corporate-wide document management solution would help to serve the needs of our producers and journalists more effectively and quickly.

Juan de Meer
Chief Information Officer, RTVE

Solution

RTVE transformed its media production with OpenText™ IDOL. IDOL streamlined searches of the 50-year, 20M+ asset archive, integrated diverse content, and accelerated TV and radio production. Critical challenges were resolved with efficiency and innovation.

Products deployed

  • OpenText™ IDOL

    IDOL Unstructured Data Analytics deploys AI and machine learning to find insights within unstructured data—including text, audio, video, and images

Services provided

  • OpenText™ Professional Services

    OpenText Professional Services streamlined IDOL integration, accelerating multimedia content access for RTVE's digital transformation

Streamlining archive searches

RTVE conducted extensive market research into the right solution to address video, image, audio and text data, and the tender was granted to a systems integrator to include OpenText™ IDOL as the corporate search solution. With IDOL’s support for several data types, and with a large variety of source connectors, IDOL helps index data quickly without disruption or relocation.

Creating a user-friendly index for diverse assets

RTVE engaged with OpenText™ Professional Services to deliver this complex project. De Meer commented, “It was very difficult to take data from many disparate sources that has been collected over the last 50 years and index the information in a uniform way to make it easily searchable. We feel we need to preserve this slice of Spanish history for our citizens to enjoy and we relished the challenge to create a fully indexed information repository for our producers and journalists to leverage. Our staff are creative people, not particularly technical ones, and so we needed to make it user-friendly. It was essential that accurate and relevant results are returned as fast as possible. OpenText™ Professional Services managed all the integration points for us and created a fast and scalable IDOL system.” If a journalist needs, for example, to find an image or footage of Fernando Alonso winning the Monaco Grand Prix, this needs to be at his fingertips. Same with a documentary producer looking for a specific clip of King Felipe or other relevant people. These types of searches could take hours, or even days, in the previous archive.

Accelerating TV and radio content production

With the new IDOL-driven system, results are returned in seconds, and the relevant asset can be quickly downloaded and edited into a new item for use in the news or other TV programs. De Meer explained how life has changed now that 50 years’ worth of footage is so easily accessible, “Our users love our IDOL system. There is so much more we can do, and we are only just scratching the surface of the possibilities with IDOL. We want to further leverage the robust Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities more effectively within IDOL to learn from our data, and to identify key concepts and their relationships with other concepts within the repository. This will then deliver contextually relevant search results for our producers and journalists.”

Person handling camera

The deployment of IDOL has helped us to deploy a fast and scalable multimedia information repository with contextually relevant asset discovery capability powered by AI. It fully supports our digital transformation goals for continual innovation and positions us perfectly for the future.

Juan de Meer
Chief Information Officer, RTVE

Results

OpenText delivered transformative results for RTVE by seamlessly ensuring instant access to 20M+ assets. Content search durations were reduced from hours to seconds, revolutionizing TV production and supporting RTVE's digital innovation goals.

Reduced search time by 90%

All RTVE’s critical data sources, such as news, documentaries, radio, etc. are now managed centrally, irrespective of their format, which could be video, audio, text, or image.

Enhanced content accessibility

The new content search ability has drastically reduced the time it takes to produce programs, as de Meer explained, “Using OpenText™ IDOL our journalists have over 20 million media assets at their fingertips. Simple and complex searches return results in seconds and the system makes it easy to just download and edit any relevant content. It has completely revolutionized the way television is produced within RTVE. We can respond instantly to events happening around the world, with contextually relevant archive footage that would have taken us hours to find in the past.”

Revolutionized production efficiency

De Meer concluded, “The collaborative deployment of IDOL with OpenText™ Professional Services has helped us to deploy a fast and scalable multimedia information repository with contextually relevant asset discovery capability powered by AI. It fully supports our digital transformation goals for continual innovation and positions us perfectly for the future.”