Vimond IO Helps RLT Croatia Navigate Coronavirus, Earthquake

Vimond provides the cloud-based video editing platform for RTL Croatia’s news production including staff training, enabling RTL to go into production within one day to support their Disaster Recovery plan.

While the world and Croatia were dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic, Zagreb was hit by a strong earthquake in the morning of March 22, causing significant damage in the city. RTL needed to ensure business continuity with journalists working at home in a time of great uncertainty due to the pandemic combined with the damage and fallout of the earthquake.

RTL Hrvatska, or RTL Croatia, is the biggest media company in the country (owned by RTL Group) headquartered in Zagreb with daily news broadcasts, three free-to-air, four IPTV channels and one satellite channel where they broadcast their own produced content in addition to other content.

Video is key for RTL’s digital strategy and to ensure distribution of near-live clips and video highlights from their daily national news shows to their website, Vimond IO was implemented as a fast and responsive solution while it’s ease of use minimized the time needed to train staff.

Through Vimond IO, journalists and video editors at RTL can now easily extract any content from their live feed and make clips for further distribution. Vimond IO is completely cloud-based which ensures Business Continuity for RTL Croatia through remote editing in a browser, ensuring that their journalists can continue to deliver stories while not having to rely on hardware and software which is only accessible in their office.

Every day, RTL Hrvatska broadcasts their live news shows to their audience, providing Croatians with high-quality situation reports on the current state of affairs, both on a national and on a global level.

Through their main website, videos and news articles are constantly published to update their viewers with the latest news. However, after enforcing strict work-from-home policies in March 2020, remote clipping of live news became a challenge.

“Knowing where our true value lies, at RTL Hrvatska we always strive to ensure the best possible working environment for our employees,” says Zoran Jankovic, CTO of RTL Hrvatska. “Faced with the terrible odds of having two dreadful concurrent disasters striking Zagreb, we had to react promptly to protect the wellbeing and the lives of our employees, while ensuring business continuity at the same time. It was challenging to organize work-from-home for our “VIJESTI.HR” newsroom staff in a single night, to provide them with all the functionalities their work requires, and keep the “VIJESTI.HR” portal continuously active and available to our readers.”

Due to historic on-premise workflows, editors could no longer create clips from the live broadcasts and distribute the video to RTL’s website in an efficient way. This created a need for a remote editing platform, where RTL could ingest their live stream, make the clips they needed and edit the video for further processing.

Vimond solved this challenge by providing Vimond IO. Through Vimond IO, RTL can ingest their live stream and access any content that’s been broadcasted on the live feed. Clips can easily be created by journalists and video editors and sent for further distribution to RTL’s CMS. This provided a quick solution for RTL, which began using the system to clip their content the day after they contacted Vimond.

Features of Vimond IO in RTL’s workflow:

• Enables rapid content creation through IO’s live clipping functionality
• Enables quick distribution to multiple platforms
• Lets users easily brand the content with custom graphics
• Solved RTL’s urgent need in under one day
• Scalable and accessible, allowing for both remote and local production in various geographical locations for inter-departmental cooperation
• Easy training – Familiar workflows and intuitive user interfaces enabled editors to get to work quickly
• Cost-efficient – no expensive hardware

“Our readers of the “VIJESTI.HR” portal favor video stories, and we had to make sure the journalists have the necessary tools to prepare video articles equal in amount and quality to those published previously from our HQ via the on-premises Production Asset Management system,” says Jankovic. “Furthermore, we had to find a solution and have it integrated within a single day. Thankfully, Matias Høibraaten approached us at the right moment. Matias and his team managed to have the service configured and customized for us in less than a day! Luckily, Vimond’s UX is streamlined to support our video article publishing workflow virtually with no particular configuration needed. Hence, our journalists were able to proceed with their production in the Vimond system almost a few hours after the system was set up, and their training completed.”

After implementing the solution, RTL Hrvatska can enjoy a new workflow where journalists and editors can make near-instant clips from the live streams and process the content for further distribution. They can work from anywhere with no installation on their computers. The workflow lets users brand the content with custom graphics, and facilitates easy cooperation through a shared workspace.

The ease-of-use Vimond IO has also turned out to be a key reason for RTL Croatia’s quick implementation. Vimond IO’s intuitive user interface helped reduce the barrier for the new video editor all while solving this urgent challenge quickly.

For more information on Vimond, please contact Megan Wagoner at [email protected].