RFO Extends NETIA Installation to Enhance Management, Archiving, and Distribution of Audio and Video

Integration of Manreo Media Asset Management Software Provides Foundation for Efficient Storage, Repurposing, and Multiplatform Delivery of Media.

CLARET, France - July 21, 2009 - NETIA today announced that Réseau France Outre-mer (French Overseas Network, or RFO), a subsidiary of the Group France Television, is installing the company's Manreo media asset management (MAM) solution to simplify file and archive management of content at the broadcaster's Paris headquarters and nine regional production centers. Manreo is being integrated with RFO's acquisition, production, automation, and storage applications to store and enrich audio, video, and still images and subsequently facilitate the publishing of content through various delivery platforms.

" We have a strong and longstanding relationship with NETIA, having successfully deployed the company's Radio-Assist across our operations," said Christian Augereau, technical director at RFO. " As we look to leverage our media assets more effectively and more fully across our broadcast channels and newer distribution outlets, Manreo provides an intelligent solution that engages well with our existing systems. Only NETIA was able to propose a two-tier plan that we could implement - first to enrich and archive digital content and then publish it from the same application and interface."

One of the most advanced television and radio networks in the world, RFO distributes 17 television channels from its head office in Paris to French-speaking territories located tens of thousands of kilometers from one another. The broadcaster's regional production facilities are connected by satellite and ADSL around the clock, thus supporting the exchange of programs and news (both radio and TV) in real time.

RFO already has equipped its radio stations with NETIA's Radio-Assist digital audio software. Now, with the integration of Manreo, RFO will gain increased productivity in the management and use of rich audio and video, which can then be easily repurposed and published to multiple platforms including mobiles devices, IPTV, and Web portals.

Manreo is being installed across RFO in two phases, the first addressing file management and archiving and the second phase will address publishing of media. During the first stage, the software will ingest high-resolution content, generate low-resolution proxies for indexing, leverage its integrated speech-to-text capability to turn dialog into searchable text, and enable browsing of content and access to high-resolution files for editing with the Avid and Apple edit systems at seven different RFO sites.

In the second phase of installation, Manreo will be extended to publish media through its Hypercast Warehouse tool, which can be used to manage audio, video, or images in all file formats (MXF, XDCAM, mpeg 4, mpeg 2, wmv, etc.). Built-in monitoring tools will provide operators with current updates as to the status of asset restoration, transcoding of specific media to the appropriate format, and publishing of content to the target platform.