Before 2007, broadcast material reached RTL as tape. Getting footage from one location to another meant a courier, and getting it to air meant the courier arriving on time. Every producer delivering to RTL fed into the same physical bottleneck, and every internal team that needed the material waited behind it.
The MediaOps problem underneath was control: nobody could see where a delivery was, who had touched it, or whether it met broadcast standard until someone opened the box and checked. Scale made that worse rather than better, because each additional producer added another parcel rather than another record.
RTL selected MediaLab as its content management and delivery platform on two principles:
- Cut physical delivery out of the chain
- Standardise metadata so that content arrives described rather than described later
The requirement was not a general-purpose file tool. RTL needed producers to deliver directly into an RTL-controlled environment, with an automatic quality check at the door so that what entered the workflow already met broadcast standards, and with access tight enough that expensive format content stayed restricted to the people entitled to see it.
"We didn't want a platform like others. We wanted a solution fully dedicated to us. Think of a professional internal video channel, available only to those authorized." — Sven Sauvé, CEO, RTL Nederland
Producers working for any RTL channel upload their material directly. The platform runs the quality check, and the file lands where it needs to land. The same environment serves as the image library for internal departments and as the exchange point when an external party needs to use RTL content. One delivery route in, several operational uses out.
The platform also carried RTL through the shift from tape-based to IP workflows and through the growth of Videoland and RTL XL, where the same content had to reach viewers on demand rather than only at broadcast. The infrastructure underneath changed. The delivery route above it did not.
The operational difference since MediaLab was implemented shows up at every step of the process.