Spain’s RTVE Ties Three Facilities Together With Front Porch Digital DIVArchive

Spanish public broadcaster RTVE has installed Front Porch Digital’s DIVArchive CSM (content storage management) systems in 12 of its facilities to manage news, postproduction, and historical archives. RTVE has also installed a DIVAnet multisite content distribution system in each of its three main archive locations. The DIVAnet systems enable remote access so that the three main archives can serve as backup and disaster recovery centers for each other, completing a critical piece of the archive-and-restore picture for RTVE.

“We’ve been using DIVArchive in various locations throughout our network and have continually added more systems because we’ve always had a very good experience, so when we decided to install a more efficient, more secure disaster recovery system, Front Porch Digital was our first choice,” says Carlos Hernández Esteban, documentary fund manager at RTVE. “DIVAnet greatly advances the security of our archives because we can store content redundantly in multiple locations and access it remotely, which protects us against disaster or local technical problems. And because we were already working with Front Porch Digital and DIVArchive, the integration has been easy.”

RTVE uses DIVArchive in its main archive and production centers, two in Madrid and one in Barcelona, with regional supporting archives in nine other production centers around the country. The three main centers house not only short-term archives for news and postproduction in those locations, but also long-term archives that contain all historical content for the entire RTVE network. DIVAnet installations in those three main centers create critical redundancy for the network by eliminating RTVE’s risky practice of backing up content locally, with no connectivity among the archives. Now RTVE is able to store backup copies of all content at each of the three main DIVArchive locations, and users at each of the sites can access the other archives remotely to restore content in the event of disaster or technical problems.

“RTVE is the largest audiovisual group in Spain that broadcasts in the Spanish language and has been a respected broadcaster for decades, with many years’ worth of high-value assets that would be catastrophic to lose,” says Rino Petricola, COO and general manager, Front Porch Digital. “DIVArchive has given RTVE powerful, sophisticated archiving and production capabilities over the years, and now, with DIVAnet, they have distributed interconnected databases to make doubly sure they never lose any of those assets.”