Tech event: Modernisation of the SRF media archive

Wednesday, October 25, 2023

The FARO media archive from Swiss Radio and Television SRF is to journalists what YouTube is to normal internet users: they search it for film and audio material to back up current reports. After 15 years of successful operation, the media archive has been completely modernised.

A media company like SRF is in competition with all media platforms that can be viewed on a mobile phone or at home. It has to be as fast as Twitter, as personal as TikTok and still fulfil the high standards of journalistic content. This is a challenging balancing act. The Faro media archive is an important tool that helps to prepare content very quickly and yet in a journalistically correct way.

In the archive, journalists can access material dating back to the 1930s, for example a quote from a member of the National Council for a political report, archive images of a country for foreign reports or the exploits of a football team for sports programmes. Newly produced programmes are recorded daily in the archive, including metadata such as scene descriptions, content information and usage notes.

The FARO media archive was developed by SCS for SRF 20 years ago. It is a specific application that supports the workflow of SRF journalists. Since then, the archive has been used on a daily basis. When FARO was developed, applications were installed locally on the PC and the backend ran on dedicated servers. Today, web applications are the state of the art. Data is stored in the cloud. The requirements in terms of search and usability have also increased. SCS therefore developed a new version of the FARO web client including the necessary backend with video streaming in a private cloud.

As with the original version, user input was consistently incorporated into the implementation, which sets FARO apart from standard solutions. The search function has also been made more convenient: thanks to facets and filters, journalists can find the desired results more quickly.

At the tech event, Philippe Koller, Head of Media Technology at SRF, and Martin Blumenstein, SRF Project Manager, will show how the media company is anticipating the technological change and pursuing a corresponding IT strategy. Jérôme Stettler, Department Head Digital Transformation, will present a look behind the scenes of the media archive and show the challenges of such a project.

Sprecher

  • Philippe Koller

    Philippe Koller

    Head of Media Technology at SRF
  • Martin Blumenstein

    Martin Blumenstein

    Head of Research & Archive Technology at SRF
  • Jérôme Stettler

    Jérôme Stettler

    Department Head at SCS

Video

SCS Tech-Event: SRF Media Archive The SRF media archive has been completely modernised