Tech Event: Modernization of the SRF Media Archive

A media company like SRF is competing with all the media platforms that can be watched on a cell phone or on a screen at home. It has to be as fast as Twitter, as personal as TikTok, and still meet the high standards for journalistic content. It's a challenging balancing act. The media archive Faro helps as an important working tool to prepare the content very quickly and still journalistically correct.

In the archive, journalists can access material dating back to the 1930s, such as 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 soccer team for sports broadcasts. Newly produced broadcasts are recorded daily in the archive, including metadata such as scene descriptions, synopses and usage notes. 

The media archive FARO 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, the backend ran on dedicated servers. Today, web applications are the state of the art. Data is stored in the cloud. Search and usability requirements 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. Searching has also become more convenient: thanks to facets and filters, journalists get to the desired hit faster.

At the tech event, Philippe Koller, Head of Media Technology at SRF, and Martin Blumenstein, Project Manager at SRF, will show how the media company is anticipating the technology shift 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.