WORLD CONFERENCE 2013OCTOBER 25 - 28 2013 DUBAI, UAE

Eva-Lis Green, Irene Tostar (2013). SVT Open Archive.

SVT OPEN ARCHIVEIrene TOSTAR, Eva-Lis GREEN

Sveriges Television AB

The 16th of April 2013 SVTs new Open Archive was launched and some results, advantages, problems and processes connected to this new release are discussed in this paper. A new legislation and a copyright branch agreement made it possible to publish much more interesting content from the archive like Drama, Entertainment etc. A project group started to work a year in advance to follow the negotiation with the branch organizations, investigate new workflows and IT-support needed, build a new organization and implement all this to enable the new site to be launched in spring 2013. Even if we don’t know how the future will be the launch has so far been a success.

Open Archive, Rights, Media Management

SVT OPEN ARCHIVE – THE SCOOP

SVT have had an open archive since the beginning of 2000 but this initiative was suffering from a lot a restrictions. The situation was such that all programs and clips containing third party rights; such as music, actors etc had to be excluded in the old site. A new copyright legislation 2011 made it possible for SVT to negotiate archive license agreements with the collecting societies Copyswede and STIM (music rights). Since the beginning of 2013 it has been possible for SVT to publish all in-house productions published before July 2005. Each right holder has the right to advise a veto to SVT or Copyswede if he/she refuses the program that he/she took part in is published on the Open archive site. (No one has yet used this right however!)

SVT shall report the specific programmes, clips and rights holders to the collecting society Copyswede and STIM who is responsible to allocate the payment to each right holder. SVT is paying Copyswede an agreed amount for the right to publish programmes on the open archive site. If a rights holder claims payment and we have not reported this an investigation will take place.

When the updated SVT Open Archive site was launched the 16th of April this year it contained approx 300 titles (200 hours of video). Today we have 2000 titles and approx. 1400 hours of video. The goal for this service is 10 000 hours of video content reached in a six-year period.

The Open Archive initiative is a public site (geoblocked to Sweden) with attractive titles published before 2005 in all genres such as drama, entertainment, sports event, documentaries, children’s programmes, and news clips etc. We have to take into consideration the public service values and publish content of interest for as many interest groups as possible such as language or religious minority groups.

So we want to create a full range site with all genres of programmes for all people.

Another guideline for the site is to be of current interest and importance, to connect to and make themes from current news, events, anniversaries, festivals etc.

And a third guideline is to respond to the requirements from our audience. Open Archive is of course active on Facebook. We try to pick up individual requests of programmes and publish them rapidly and regularly.

Copyright © of this paper is the property of the author(s). FIAT/IFTA is granted permission to reproduce copies of this work for purposes relevant to the above conference and future communication by FIAT/IFTA without limitation, provided that the author(s), source and copyright notice are included in each copy. For other uses, including extended quotation, please contact the author(s).

Irene Tostar, Eva-Lis Green

The site is controlled by tags. But of course the audience needs some help to navigate. On the site we recommend titles and have a “latest news department”.

We also package the range of programmes to make it easier to search.

The society, the language and the values of the citizens have changed a lot since the Fifty – Sixties and the beginning of television so important ethical considerations have to be made when picking up programmes from the archive.

Still we have some restrictions to consider when choosing the programmes. We don’t yet have an agreement with the Independent producer organization so we are not able to publish co productions or in house productions containing clips from feature films etc. We neither have an agreement with the music publishers so that prevents us from using “grand rights” that means opera and ballet performances.

Examples of some ethical considerations; we found some naked children dancing in a music performance. Not ok today so we did not publish that.

Strong political statements made by ordinary people; we have to be careful when publishing.

Some figures:

Today we have 1500 hours. When we started in April = 500 hours.

Every month we publish 100 - 150 hours.

A quite big group, about 1.5 millions, 20-44 years old, (without children staying with them) are using the service. The Swedish population is 9 million citizens.

And they stay for approximately 45 minutes every time visiting the site.

Twice a year SVT conducts a large phone interview with thousands of Swedes. (Sifo)

When being asked 37% said they knew about the Open Archive compared to Netflix that 52% knew about.

This survey took place in May and the archive was launched in April.

Next survey will be made in November this year.

15% claims to have used the archive at any point this year, compared to the 19% who claims to have used Netflix.

One explanation is of course that the threshold for trying out the Open Archive is basically non-existent since it is a free service and doesn’t require an account.

So approx 5% of the population between 9-99 years are using it on a weekly basis according to our numbers. That’s roughly 400.000 individuals.

NOT ONLY TO OPEN UP

The process to get the programs ready for publishing is not done from one day to another. A project group was formed in the spring 2012. There was one content project manager and one project manager for infrastructure appointed. The project group had representatives from SVT Interactive and the Archive and Rights department. The core group consisted of only five persons but we called for experts when needed. The group had to work with all different angles needed to create a new service in a year. We had a very tight timetable. Questions like how the work should be organized, what new workflows and tools was needed etc. had to be investigated and implemented. We had to have knowledge about what type of content from the 300 000 hours of Video in the archives that could be published, how much in the archives that was digitized and what programs needed subtitling etc. Some project members, together with legal advisers from the Legal department, also took active part in the negotiations with the rights holder’s

2 FIAT/IFTA World Conference 2013 in Dubai

SVT Open Archive

organizations. The work was extremely condensed and a lot of issues were discussed and investigated.

It was decided that the work with the new service should be performed in the existing organisation. Research, media management, rights control and reporting was the responsibility for the Archives and Rights department (6 persons in total) and the editorial work (2 persons) should be done at SVT Interactive department. Off course SVT reorganized during this period leading to a delay for the editorial organisation to get in place. But nevertheless a research and rights team and the media managers was in place in November 2012 but it lasted until February 2013 before we had the editorial department in place.

WORKFLOW

A decision was made early on that we should use as much as possible from the broadcast publishing workflow, the same program planning tool, the same delivery tools, the same media asset management etc. Some adjustments in the existing it-systems were done but some new tools were needed. The new web site and the streaming process had to be defined and implemented.

We built a new workflow tool “digit” that has shown to be very useful. In this system we can follow an errand from the first order to the final publishing. If a program of any reason can’t be published depending on rights not being available for clips or photos, not being a 100% SVT owned program, ethical reasons, media or subtitling issues the errand is stored in the system and the request has not to be investigated again. If something changes in the negotiated agreements and we can publish rights that we cannot do today the errand can be made active again.

To reach this result we held a lot of workshops trying to find the smartest workflow process possible. This workshop process was very time consuming but worth while. We needed to find all professional groups that were involved in the process. What became obvious for us was that it was more or less like starting a new TV-channel where all professionals in a media house were needed in one way or another. We had not to forget trailers for communication and marketing and the communication with press and users. But for the workflow tool built we came to the conclusion to concentrate on the process handed out by the Archives and Rights department from request to delivery. The process of planning, publishing, marketing etc. was taken care of in the existing broadcast systems.

The picture of the process map is in Swedish but it does not matter because it’s just there for getting an idea of the final map we decided on and we will try to explain the different steps in English. See figure 1. The first action in the workflow starts with the editorial team to place an order “request” in the system. It can be a specified program/clip or a research for a theme, a person, an event or similar. What metadata to follow the order is defined in the order form and it also contains a planned publishing date. This metadata will then follow the order during the rest of the process. The order is placed with a researcher that will continue the work. Rights professionals will be involved as early as possible. The researcher has to provide more metadata and if it is a theme research the results goes back to the editorial team to select the titles to be used. After this step we know if the program/clip will be stored in the database for the future or if the process proceeds. Next step is to check the material and subtitling. A program card is registered in the planning and scheduling system and a digitized material can be posted to the Media Management system. The quality is checked and the program get’s OK when also the subtitling is available. Some rights information is also registered in the MAM system for further use.

FIAT/IFTA World Conference 2013 in Dubai 3

Irene Tostar, Eva-Lis Green

Figure 1. Digit Process map.

Since a lot of useful metadata is registered in the system statistics can be accessible. See figure 2. You can see the rights control, the different genres used and how many errands there are at the different stages at the moment. This statistics is very useful for the editorial team given the tool to follow and errand and also see what genres we have and what type of programs genres we want to find more of. The biggest genres at the moment are in size order music, drama, children programs, entertainment and sports.

Figure 2. Statistics from Digit

Also a reporting tool is built using metadata from existing systems and mapping the metadata into an excel-report requested from Copy Swede. The report shall be sent every month. There are few additional metadata not all ready existing in our MAM system that’s needed to be registered, just a few additions concerning rights holders before 1989. And of course when this is done you can click Metadata OK in the workflow system.

A major part from SVTs Archive is digitized. In one years time all analogue videotapes will be just a memory. The SVT digital archive storage contains 6 PB high resolution video today. We have still to find funding and the best practice process to digitize our film collection on film base. Today films is digitized on demand and some parts of the extensive film archive is processed but approx. 50 000 hours is still remaining.

4 FIAT/IFTA World Conference 2013 in Dubai

SVT Open Archive

Another step that was investigated and still need enhancement is the tagging and what metadata to be shown to the public. The open archive site has two parts a video site and a blog. The blog takes care of the general issues needed to be communicated and in the video site there is metadata connected to the video files. In the beginning tags were entered for persons, genres, dates and titles. Today we discuss to bring in the SVT MAM thesaurus as well, since we do see that finding programs and clips will be more demanding the more material that’s in there. The tagging issue is a paper of it’s own since a lot of different perspectives has to be considered, like user generated tags etc.

NEXT STEP

There is still refining end development to do. The web site can be extended with more interesting tools. The workflow can be optimized even more. We hope that we can go on expanded in the positive way as we have done so far. And by the way the site was given the gold Swedish design prize for editorial web.

Figure 3. SVT Open archive Front

FIAT/IFTA World Conference 2013 in Dubai 5