NEP Europe has announced an extension of its collaboration with Norwegian horse racing company Norsk Rikstoto, with NEP Mediabank now forming the central media asset management (MAM) platform across the entire Rikstoto ecosystem.
Building on a partnership that began in 2008, Rikstoto has selected NEP Mediabank to support the launch of Play, its new direct-to-consumer OTT streaming service.
As the operational backbone of Rikstoto Direkte, NEP Mediabank has evolved with the channel to provide live ingest, long-term archiving and distribution of thousands of horse races every year. Its fully managed, round-the-clock service is backed by NEP’s dedicated team, said the company.
Play’s launch combines all distribution, broadcast, TV channel, digital and OTT into a single NEP Mediabank environment, enabling the simultaneous availability of racing content across all channels without duplicating workflows or data silos and providing a single clear source for rights, metadata, results, and timing information.
The deployment aims to provide the following key benefits:
- Unified and automated ingest and distribution: a single workflow captures live race content and publishes it simultaneously to broadcast, the TV channel, and the OTT platform, reducing duplication and speeding up time to screen.
- Automated, data driven content creation: NEP Mediabank generates content by combining live race footage with real time metadata, betting data, and results from Rikstoto’s systems.
- Intelligent metadata enrichment: results, odds, timing, and racing data are linked to content at the point of ingest, making the archive fully searchable and enabling more personalised on demand experiences for OTT audiences.
- End to end subtitling workflow: all content assets move through a fully managed subtitling pipeline, with completed subtitles inserted directly into the platform.
- Deep archival monetisation: Rikstoto’s library of tens of thousands of races, built over nearly two decades, becomes an active content asset for the OTT platform, available for replay, editorial use, and audience engagement.
- Future ready scalability: the platform is built to grow with Rikstoto’s ambitions, supporting new content formats, international racing markets, and changing audience behaviour without the need for changing platform.
Frode Martnes, executive producer at Norsk Rikstoto, said, “Launching our OTT platform is about more than adding a new channel. It is about building a direct, lasting relationship with our audience on their terms. Having NEP Mediabank as the single foundation across all our distribution means we can move faster, operate more efficiently, and deliver a seamless experience to our fans, whether they are watching on television or on their phone. Sixteen years of partnership gave us the confidence to extend it further, and the results speak for themselves.”
Marius Borge, key account manager at NEP, added, “Rikstoto’s decision to extend NEP Mediabank to their OTT platform reflects a broader shift in the industry. Rightsholders are moving towards a single, trusted media infrastructure that supports every distribution channel from one environment. We have been proud to run their broadcast operation around the clock for nearly two decades, and being chosen for this next step shows the trust built over time and what NEP Mediabank delivers.”
