Sonuma Ensures Its Digital Archive with More Than 120,000 Hours of Multimedia Content Is Easily Accessible and Downloadable for Journalists
 
 

Sonuma Ensures Its Digital Archive with More Than 120,000 Hours of Multimedia Content Is Easily Accessible and Downloadable for Journalists

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Sonuma, the Society for the Digitalization and Commercialization of Audiovisual Archives, was created in 2009 by the French Community of Belgium (located in the Walloon region), and the Radio Télévision Belge Francophone (RTBF) (the national television broadcasting company). As a subsidiary of RTBF, with the goal to implement an infrastructure dedicated to the preservation, digitization, and commercialization of RTBF’s audiovisual archives, Sonuma became the owner of all RTBF’s audiovisual archives. Part of its agreement states that the archives are to be made available to the RTBF, free of charge.

Sonuma was looking for a robust storage solution that would enable it to store its digital archive that includes 120,000 hours of content from a variety of media, as well as support future digital archive growth. The solution also needed to support the organization’s goal of preserving, managing, and commercializing this content. With Oracle’s StorageTek SL3000, Sonuma has digitized thousands of hours of content while providing additional storage space for future additions to the library. In addition, with the help of Oracle partner Netia, the organization created a Web portal to facilitate journalist access to this content.

 
 

 
 

Challenges

A word from Sonuma

  • “Oracle’s StorageTek SL3000 not only helps us to easily manage our vast archive and make it readily available to journalists, but it also prepares us for future growth, thanks to its scalability.” – Eric Denis, IT Manager, Sonuma

  • Implement a scalable storage solution that could store a vast and steadily growing archive of digitized media content
  • Realize a highly automated workflow, from receipt of digital content, through delivery to specific journalists and the general public, simplifying the task of preserving, managing, and accessing content within a rapidly-growing digital library
  • Provide a solution that can easily and quickly provide searchable. low- and high-resolution content to large groups of journalists
  • Implement a solution that enables easy access to the digital, audiovisual content from any location at any time

Solutions

Oracle Product and Services

  • Implemented Oracle’s StorageTek SL3000 modular library system to effectively store a continuously growing multimedia archive containing digitized content from 30,000 hours of video on Betamax-tapes, 24,000 hours of radio on video home system (VHS) tapes, 14,000 hours of content on digital audio tapes (DAT), and 6,000 hours of film reels
  • Realized, in combination with Oracle Partner Netia’s Content Management System, an automated workflow that enables flexible and highly-efficient use of the archive, based on the performance of the storage solution, search tools, and a powerful content management system thesaurus
  • Provided a storage solution that supports quick and user-friendly access by journalists from RTBF and other media outlets,
  • Used a storage and archive management quick-file system (SAM-QFS) that gives access to archive content directly via a Web service providing anytime, anywhere access without the need of a client-program database

Partner

Netia, a leading provider of software solutions for audiovisual content management, deployed its content management system, Hypercast Warehouse, which provides tools for content packaging, metadata tagging, and rights management.