Irish EBU Member RTÉ has won a prestigious innovation award at the International Broadcasting Convention (IBC), in Amsterdam, with Belgian public service broadcaster RTBF one of two runners-up.

RTÉ's pioneering File Acquisition & Server Technology (FAST) project – which trades tape for a file-based system – won the IBC Innovation Award for Content Management at a ceremony in Amsterdam’s RAI convention centre.

Moving its play-out systems to file has enabled the Irish broadcaster to move away from labour-intensive, tape-based workflows, while future-proofing itself in readiness for file-based content delivery in standard and high definition, to terrestrial, cable, satellite, online and mobile platforms.

In a statement issued after the win, RTÉ Director General Noel Curran said: “A key objective in RTÉ’s strategy is to lead within our sector. To remain relevant to our audiences RTÉ must continue to embrace new technology. This win is important: it tells us that, even in challenging times, RTÉ has the vision, and the people, it needs to become the best public-service media organisation it can be.”

RTÉ’s strategic vision is shared by many EBU Members, including Belgian public service broadcaster RTBF, whose ‘GEMS Semantic Multimedia Browser’ project was a runner-up in the same category.

GEMS links data extracted from traditional sources and speech-to-text, then combines it with Linked Open Data via a web page. For example, a programme that discusses parks, in which trees are discussed, is linked automatically to other web resources about trees, contextualising the tree that appears in the programme being searched. In addition to traditional archive search functions, the tool enables journalists and other content creators to browse and access the knowledge hidden inside the audiovisual documents.

RTBF’s Head of Archives, Xavier Jacques-Jourion, said: “Research in the field of semantic technologies has long been of strategic importance for RTBF. Last year we started working on applying some research results, which led us to this revolutionary tool. Innovation leadership has always been among the values of RTBF as a public broadcaster and it remains so today, more than ever."

In addition, the EBU's Italian Member RAI was also a winner at IBC, as part of a consortium behind the Vision Cloud project. The initiative, which brings together users, vendors and academics to develop principles by which services and storage in the cloud can best be used for media, was presented with the IBC Special Award.

Alberto Messina of RAI thanked IBC for recognizing the project, saying that it offered strategic value for broadcasters and media companies. "Vision Cloud is a very innovative project which will provide RAI with technologies which will considerably help in the current transition towards a fully digital production environment," he said.
 

IBC's Prof. Crawford (left) presents the IBC award for VISION Cloud to (from left to right) Hillel Kolodner (IBM Research Haifa), Eliot Salant (IBM Research Haifa) and Alberto Messina (RAI - Centre for Research and Technological Innovation). (Courtesy of RAI)