AUCKLAND, New Zealand—At Television New Zealand (TVNZ)—the country’s largest broadcaster—we work at the forefront of news and entertainment in New Zealand, delivering content to more than two million New Zealanders daily through free-to-air broadcast channels TVNZ 1, 2, DUKE and online platforms TVNZ+ and 1news.co.nz.
As New Zealand’s most-trusted news provider, our priority is getting the story out to audiences, so we empowered our news and current affairs (NCA) teams to do as much of the work themselves, with far less reliance on our archivists. The ability to search and pull back content is essential to telling engaging stories.
With an extensive history of footage and valuable media assets, we also knew that investing in a good media asset management system was paramount to making it easy for NCA teams to access the content they need, whether it’s recently archived or decades old. Viz One delivers that for us.
Archived With Viz One
In the weeks leading up to New Zealand’s recent general election, for example, we had reporters in the field every day following politicians and party leaders; all that content came back to base and was archived through Viz One so it could be readily accessible by the newsroom if purged from the Avid editing environment. We also had a very busy archive team making sure all the footage could be researched and accessed by producers, journalists and reporters directly from their desktops.
We introduced a digital archive managed by the Viz Ardome MAM in 2009. The migration from Ardome to Viz One added NCA to the digital archive through digitizing TVNZ’s legacy tape-based news archive to file format, which was all completed in 2017. Viz One looks after TVNZ’s archive, giving easy access to over a million unique assets spanning decades of archived content across petabytes of storage.
With our streaming platform TVNZ+ growing rapidly and with the steady growth of TVNZ’s unique content, we migrated the archive to Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud to benefit from the cost predictability, resiliency and flexibility that cloud offers. Coupled with content classification and intelligent archive rules, Viz One automatically moves content to different levels of AWS S3 archive storage, such as S3 Glacier and S3 Glacier Deep Archive. This maximizes cost efficiencies while still empowering journalists to quickly access and retrieve clips or enable Content teams to recall scheduled content for online delivery and linear playout.
The move to cloud not only enables us to protect our invaluable archive, it also opens up additional services, such as AI facial recognition and speech-to-text for metadata logging, optimizing the search and discovery process.
Digital First
We’re currently transforming our organization from a traditional linear TV broadcaster to a digital-first media company. What was compelling for us in choosing Viz One was the open API architectures and the partnerships that Vizrt has developed for our other key technologies, such as AWS and Avid. Beyond that, the ability to upskill our team using Viz University gives us further access to the value of our core tools.
It was important for us to choose a reliable MAM system to manage decades of media archive content and be able to repurpose it easily and quickly. At TVNZ, we understand the responsibility of being an authority source of the truth, and that comes with being responsible with our footage. Knowing it’s safe and ready to be reimagined is why we chose Vizrt. l
More information is available at www.vizrt.com.
