Innovation Awards 2010

BCE and Front Porch Digital proudly announce that the European […]

September 22, 2010

BCE and Front Porch Digital proudly announce that the European Parliament’s Audiovisual Unit won the IBC2010 Award for content management for their digitization infrastructure and its public access.The finalists in the content management category were the multi-platform newsroom at Antena 3 in Spain and the plan to bring the 50 years of video and audio archive of the European Parliament online.

Because it harnessed remarkable technology (automatically ingesting from a huge number of formats) to a civic issue (giving the public access to their parliamentary debates) the judges handed the prize to the European Parliament Audiovisual Unit. Following a call for tender, BCE & Front Porch Digital teamed up and achieved the platform in less than a year. It is the first time that the digitization process passes directly from the encoder to the digital library archive without the use of a server and its proprietary file format, allowing the audiovisual team to work faster and drastically reducing energy consumption.

18 000 hours of archive

The content is stored in an 18,000 hours digital archive with the upgrade capability to 90,000 hours of video files. Its internal and public access is made via the Media Asset Management which handles high resolution copies for production use and low resolution files for the 16 external consoles and the archivists working stations. The next step of the project will be the connection with the production department to encourage the content re-use for future films, series & documentaries.

“Preserving contents for future generations is a race on time. With its digitization infrastructure and its tapeless workflow, the contents are protected and their re-use in new production optimized,” comments Jean Lampach, Chief Technology & Development Officer at BCE. “The innovation award rewards the European Parliament for its concern on historical archives and their added value, but also rewards all our team for the development of such platforms”. “The European Parliament is one of the first media organisations to reap the benefits of efficiency, cost effectiveness and transparency in an integrated migration and management workflow.” Rino Petricola, SVP Managing Director at Front Porch Digital International. The award was accepted on behalf of the European Parliament by Fernando Carbajo, Head Audiovisual Unit and Stéphane Rigaud, Head of the engineering department of the Audiovisual Unit.

Watch video

In the same category