Italy’s national broadcaster RAI partnered with Fincons Group to redesign and modernize its Media Factory. Assigned through a public tender in 2020, the project led to the creation of Sfera, a cutting-edge, modular platform designed to manage the full lifecycle of video content—from ingest to quality control, certification, and distribution.
Fincons played a key role in shaping the technical and application architecture, delivering agility and future-ready innovation for RAI’s media operations.
The Challenge
In 2020, Fincons has won a public tender for software development within the scope of RAI’s multimedia asset management. This initiative led to a framework agreement aimed at improving and evolving Media asset management within RAI’s Media Factory.
Then, Fincons started providing strategic support for RAI in designing and developing a robust new architecture for their Media Factory platform, able to ensure end-to-end management of video assets and raw materials, covering asset ingestion, quality control, transcoding, and playout delivery.
The Solution
RAI’s Media Factory ecosystem serves as the central hub for managing content workflows, ensuring seamless processing and validation of video assets. Fincons Group played a pivotal role in both technical and application component design, ensuring a streamlined and efficient process for asset handling, enabling:
- Asset Check-in: Defining an official RAI corporate asset upon ingestion into the system.
- Asset Movement: Managing asset transfers across RAI’s internal information systems.
- Product Certification: Technical certification by an expert user who generates a technical sheet and determines the asset’s readiness for transmission.
- Material Preparation for Broadcast: Validating the presence of necessary materials based on the broadcast schedule.
As part of this transformation, the Media Factory has been rebranded as Sfera, representing its evolution into a next-generation media management platform.
The Benefits
Fincons Group supported RAI in developing a cutting-edge solution that ensures agility and adaptability in an evolving media landscape.
The new architecture delivers significant advantages, including:
• Decoupling of system components: enhancing modularity and flexibility in the platform’s structure.
• A cleaner, more efficient architecture: reducing redundancy and improving system maintainability.
• Future-proof integration: aligning with RAI’s strategic direction and ensuring scalability for upcoming developments.
Fincons has also won another public tender that led to a renewal of the collaboration, allowing further evolution of RAI’s media asset management system for the future.
For some years now, Fincons has been supporting us extensively in the area of software development services. It has proved to be one of our most valuable suppliers because of its ability to analyse our business processes and its reliability in constantly supporting us during the various project phases”
Andrea Menozzi, RAI-Tecnologie, Head of IT Infrastructures Design and Operations
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