RAI - Radiotelevisione Italiana is the exclusive licensee of Italian public broadcasting service; it produces television channels, radio, satellite, digital terrestrial platform. Radio Rai is the division of RAI dealing with the production of radio programs, as well as the overall planning of the radio broadcasts.
At its very early stage in late ’90, with the transition to the digital of the of the Radio ahead, the first phase of the project was focused on the implementation of a digitalization process, from ¼” tapes to digital files on DLT tapes. The process began in May 1996 and ended in 2002 and consisted in the conversion from analog to digital of 145,000 tapes. A study of the best techniques and organization models made it possible to reach a good compromise between quality requirements, time and costs.
Up to nowadays the system went into valuable upgrades carried out in the period 2006-2013 by Discovery Reply, also switching its former “Audioteca” name to the new one “Digiteca”, with a first stage of the transition to SOA already achieved. The archive technologies evolved in time from the former DLTIV to LTO3, and now LTO5. Currently the overall system is integrated with Radio Production, Rai Teche Multimedia Catalogue and MusiPOP. Video HD contents have begun to be handled as part of the radio production processes.
The system has been redesigned on a SOA driven architecture, re-modulating and refactoring basic services and providing a more flexible BPM capability as the main orchestration framework. The existing contents will be reorganized and made more accessible on modern devices. The preservation of multimedia material is ensured by a completely automated tracking of material stored on digital tapes.
An automated Tape Library Oracle StorageTek SL8500 with the Discovery Storage Manager (DSM) solution, integrated with the Discovery Multimedia Asset Management (MAM), allows the near-line archival and off-line management of digital data onto LTO5 tapes. The DSM solution supports automatic rotation of exhausted tapes, mirrored Tape Library management, whose introduction is forthcoming and foreseen together with the switching to LTO6-7. DSM also provides automatic production and management of off-line backup tapes and hot migration program management. Moreover the system provides the capability to rebuild the entire archive with information collected from tapes after a severe outage (disaster recovery). The master archive is now populated with more than 360.000 hours of high quality over nearly 1.4M audio contents, in addition to more of 900.000 hours of audio recordings in broadcast quality, spanning along around 70 years of broadcasted material onto RAI Radio channels. The overall archive sizes nearly 5M files, with 300TB data spanning over more than 140 years of continuous audio listening.
The constant presence of Discovery Reply side-by-side with Radio RAI in more than ten-years of collaboration bears the witness to how the Company recognizes Reply’s value in terms of competence and flexibility. Discovery Reply brought the contribution of its technical know-how, combined with a proven solutions and project teams, acting eventually as a partner for the realization of specific architectures with a strong technological innovation.
The strength of the solution is the adoption of an open architecture and standards, based on consolidated technologies for the integration of the Digiteca with the other production systems, accompanied by a strong coordination in the implementation of functional extensions.