Switzerland's national public broadcaster SRG SSR idée suisse will this week launch its on demand film service at the Locarno International Film Festival.
The broadcaster's subsidiary, SWISS TXT, led the project with Red Bee Media designing and building the on demand service that will be available through three of the broadcaster's Web portals — TSR, in French; SF, in German; and RTSI in Italian.
Initially the service will launch with 35 films available for download, with plans to offer more than 600 films. Films will range from 1 CHF to 7 CHF each in price, and consumers will pay for them through PayPal.
The initial films available through the service have been digitised and transcoded through Red Bee Media's Digital Hive at its Broadcast Centre in West London. Red Bee Media has built in an administration portal for each broadcaster, allowing them to retain editorial control. Through the portal, films can be uploaded with the click of a button, tagged with metadata to allow a search function and an "Editor's Choice" list can be maintained.
All films will be protected by geo-IP technology to ensure that the films are only available in territories where the rights are held. Once a film has been downloaded, the user has 30 days to start watching it. Once the play button is been pressed, they have 48 hours to finish viewing the film.
"We have thousands of hours of fantastic films and wanted to make them available at any time of day or night to our audience. Red Bee Media has made it easy for us to launch our on demand film service by providing everything from the technical build to the creative design. Most importantly, its system has enabled us to stay in control of our service, "said Beat Schneider, CEO of SWISS TXT.
