SRG SSR id_e Suisse, Switzerland’s national public broadcaster, will launch its on-demand film service his week at the Locarno Film Festival. The broadcaster’s subsidiary, SWISS TXT, led the project, with Red Bee Media designing and building the service that will be available through each of the broadcaster’s three websites – TSR, in French, SF, in German and RTSI in Italian, writes Fergal Ringrose.
“We have been able to launch three separate language websites that make a range of films available over the web in a matter of weeks using our on-demand platform. Red Bee Media has a unique combination of creative and technical skills that has allowed us to deliver an end-to-end service for SWISS TXT and take the pain out of making SRG SSR’s films more widely available through the web,” said Lucy Amortegui, head of business development at Red Bee Media.
The on-demand service will be accessed via the broadcaster’s existing websites.. Initially the service will launch with 35 films available for download, which will quickly rise to over 600 films. Films will range from 1-7 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. There is also ‘New Releases’ and ‘Top Downloads’ lists that are automatically updated to help guide users to content that interests them and make the site easier to use.
Amortegui added: “Consumers can easily be overwhelmed by the amount of video content now available on the web. That’s why our creative and media planning teams have worked with our technologists to provide our solution for SWISS TXT. We wanted to make sure that we not only provided a resilient and reliable web service, but one that consumers can easily navigate.”
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 and once the play button has 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.
