About SWR

German public broadcaster Südwestrundfunk - known as SWR; Southwest Broadcasting - is the country’s second-largest broadcast organization with an estimated audience reach of 14.7 million. Part of the ARD Network, SWR services Baden-Württemberg and Rhineland-Palatinate in the southwest of Germany. Its high quality, independent programming airs on two television and six radio channels, and includes SWR Fernsehen (regional TV news) and DASDING, a multimedia platform for young people. SWR also covers many regions outside of Germany for the ARD TV correspondent’s network.

Context & Challenge: Innovation in the Digital Age

SWR is on a mission to make innovation its core business as it transforms from producing traditional television and radio into a digital media house. With goals centered around outstanding content and technology, SWR must make its news production workflow faster and more agile.

“We want to migrate to a Cloud infrastructure and introduce automated recording and indexing to better manage our live feeds” explains Sven Wilhelm, head of the LiveU support team at SWR.

“Currently we have 60 LiveU units and 500 LU-Smart licenses deployed to our teams and reporters, capable of transmitting content to our master control rooms. Dedicated slots are needed and journalists must be physically in the office to see and access the streams. This workflow requires advance planning, human resource allocation and we can experience bottlenecks due to, for example, longer-than-planned transmissions.”

This is where a collaboration between SWR and Moments Lab (ex Newsbridge) made perfect sense.

Moments Lab Solution

SWR is running Moments Lab’s Live Asset Manager as an extension to its existing workflow. The AI-powered Cloud Media Hub ingests incoming LiveU feeds. Moments Lab Multimodal AI indexing including face, OCR (optical character recognition) and speech-to-text transcription is applied to the content to make it more searchable. Metadata is extracted and reconciled for SWR’s existing media asset manager.

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Several teams of journalists working across SWR’s national and regional news and politics programs will use the Moments Lab Media Hub. It gives them instant access to their content from anywhere, in real time. Speech-to-text enables reporters to quickly derush and identify highlights which can be filed or published to multiple platforms immediately.

“Our politics reporters are particularly enthusiastic about Moments Lab’s speech-to-text feature that automatically transcribes longer interviews in German”, says Wilhelm.

He continues:‍

“Personally I’m excited about the interactive elements of the Moments Lab portal and the team’s excellent customer support via chat.”

About Moments Lab

Moments Lab (ex Newsbridge) is a cloud media hub platform for live and archived content.

Powered by Multimodal Indexing AI and a data-driven indexing approach, Moments Lab provides unprecedented access to content by automatically detecting faces, objects, logos, written text, audio transcripts and semantic context.

Whether it be for managing and accessing live recordings, clipping highlights, future friendly archiving, content retrieval or content showcasing and monetization – the solution allows for smart and efficient media asset management.

Today our platform is used worldwide by TV Channels, Press Agencies, Sports Rights Holders, Production Houses, Journalists, Editors and Archivists to boost their production workflow and media ROI.