Finland's national public broadcasting company, YLE, operates four television channels which broadcast approximately 20,000 hours of TV programming every year—and nearly 10,000 hours are self-produced.
In order to manage such a massive amount of media, the company needed to transition away from a tape-based workflow and replace a disparate array of editing systems across its production campuses. YLE chose a complete Avid end-to-end workflow, built upon the Avid MediaCentral platform, with leveraging solutions based on the Avid Everywhere strategic vision for the future of the media industry. Avid’s powerful media management and shared storage solutions enabled YLE to streamline its workflow, improve production processes, and maximize the value of its media assets.
Moving to the digital world
Every year, YLE produces a wide range of programming—from dramas, documentaries, current affairs, and educational programming to over 2,000 hours of TV news. Production work takes place across multiple campuses, and with each location using different editing equipment and a large number of linear, tape-based workflows, YLE needed to bring its media production into a more manageable environment.
Now, our journalists can ingest, preview and pre-edit their own material and take more control over it.
Timo Salonen, Head of Technology TV, YLE
“The day of tapes was fast coming to an end and it was time to make our move into the digital world,” explains Timo Salonen, Head of Technology TV at YLE. “So, given the high volume of productions, including many made on a tight weekly schedule, we wanted to maximize process efficiency and productivity while improving the quality of our output.”
The broadcaster implemented an end-to-end Avid media management workflow at all of its production campuses. Thanks to Interplay | Production, and ISIS shared storage, YLE now benefits from the smooth integration and rich functionality of a single-vendor solution. With assets centrally stored in the Avid system, the entire production process—from ingest to transmission and archive—is not only faster and more efficient, but everyone involved in the editing process has rapid, simultaneous access to media content. Multiple users can even edit concurrently, enabling journalists to take greater responsibility for producing their own news output.
“This freed YLE from having to use so many specialist editors,” comments Salonen. “Now, our journalists can ingest, preview and pre-edit their own material and take more control over it.”
Establishing a digital archive
In addition to Interplay | Production, YLE implemented an enterprise-wide Interplay | MAM (Media Asset Management) system, spanning TV, radio and new media productions, which provides the broadcaster with a scalable and unified platform to store, search, re-use and re-purpose its archive of audiovisual content. Interplay | MAM also stores digital programming that YLE acquires from other broadcasters, Finnish subtitles for all non-Finnish programs, and program subtitles for hearing-impaired viewers. Currently, YLE is in the processes of digitizing material dating back to the 1960s.
“It's much easier to make historical programs, which are very popular at the moment as people are feeling nostalgic for the past,” Salonen explains. “When we want to add background pictures or old video clips to new programs, we can now retrieve them much more efficiently than when they were stored on tape or disk. We can also publish a digital archive on the Internet for viewing and listening by anyone, anytime.”
Salonen looks forward to an even closer and more robust implementation of Interplay | MAM in the future. For YLE, this will enable simultaneous searching across both current and historical assets. "Our local Avid team is very proactive,” says Salonen, “always putting forward new ideas and technology developments to help us optimize our programming output.”