NETIA's Radio-Assist Simplifies Repurposing of Multilingual Broadcast Content at Australia's SBS

Radio-Assist Software Automates Delivery of SBS Radio Content to SBS Online Service in 50 Different Languages.

CLARET, France - September 21, 2010 - NETIA today announced that Australia's Special Broadcasting Service (SBS), a public radio and television broadcaster delivering media in 68 different languages, is using NETIA's Radio-Assist^TM automation system to publish content to its website simply and cost-effectively. Dedicated to meeting the needs of diverse communities and cultures across Australia, SBS gathers programming from content creators worldwide and uses Radio-Assist to deliver this content online in 50 different languages.

The Radio-Assist^TM publishing module provides all the media asset management capabilities required by SBS to manage both media and metadata for accurate, efficient multilingual publication to the Web.

Advances in communication have made it necessary for radio broadcasters to reach listeners wherever they may be. NETIA's Radio-Assist^TM offers a smart, straightforward solution for extending broadcast content to the Web using minimal resources. The software goes beyond conventional radio automation to make it easy for journalists and other staff to repurpose content in multiple languages for additional platforms and, in turn, meet SBS's objective of informing, educating, and entertaining all Australians.

The multiple-language programs available through SBS Television, Radio, and Online ensure that all Australians, including the estimated 3 million Australians who speak languages other than English in their homes, are able to share the broadcaster's content. SBS Online delivers world news, current affairs, sport, film, food, and a full range of SBS television and radio programming to a monthly audience of 900,000 people.

SBS has extended features of its current Radio-Assist automation system to interface simply and efficiently with its online service. Within the NETIA solution, SBS has expended the metadata model of its production database to support all the data needed for online publishing of its radio content in multiple languages and unicode scripts. For any program audio clip, staff can associate images and rich metadata content in any language. Online publishing is then completely automated.

"SBS is a clear leader in creating, aggregating, and broadcasting programming that reflects the diverse cultures, experiences, and viewpoints in today's Australian society, and the use of Radio-Assist demonstrates that even the most complex operations spanning language and content aggregation barriers, can realise a streamlined workflow for the multi platform delivery of content. " Said Peter Stavrianos, Manager Broadcast Engineering at SBS.

With the Radio-Assist^TM platform acting as a Media Asset Management System, encoding, packaging and movement of the content with its associated metadata to the Web as a multimedia package, is as simple as marking the item with a single mouse click. Repurposing of program content for on demand in multiple languages has never been made so easy and does not require a complex system between Radio-Assist and the web site anymore.

"Large broadcast operations working in multiple languages can face a difficult challenge in repurposing content for a variety of distribution platforms, but with metadata content managed inside the production system itself, multimedia packages can now be sent directly to the web without having to manage the complexity of an intermediate Content Management System" said Benjamin SCHVENT, APAC Operations Manager at NETIA.