FIAT/IFTA World Conference 2022

Digitization & Centralization Project Of Al-Jazeera Exclusive Content

By: Dr. Dabeer Perviz., & Hanan Ali Al-Thani.
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Al Jazeera Archive accomplished an ambitious and herculean project of centralizing and digitizing all the Al Jazeera Media Network (AJMN) exclusive content from more than 70 bureaus around the globe at its headquarters Doha, Qatar.
This large-scale project required elaborate preparations, detailed planning, involving all Al Jazeera’s bureaus, which took one-year-long exercise to collate all their media at one centralized location. The project involved procurement of non-digital Al Jazeera content from the bureaus, comprising of exclusive physical assets from the last 25 years ranging from year 1996 and finally undertaking the process of digitizing, processing, converting and enriching the content before the final process of deep archiving.
One of the major challenges faced during this project was the convergence of technologies to be able to digitize the content from obsolete tapes and various physical media formats. Furthermore, the amount of content was tremendous as it mounted to 900 TB and over 60,000 tapes of different formats, which mounted to more than 10,000 hours of archived usable digital content.
The entire media content of Al Jazeera Network is now properly digitized, classified, indexed and searchable in the Central MAM systems, and is made available for direct search and use by all Al Jazeera users around the world as well for syndication purposes.
The content digitization and centralization process involved integration of indigenous in-house developed platforms, which involved Video Processing - Compression, Encryption and Content formatting, automated annotation, brand detection in addition to detailed metadata enrichment.
The detailed modus operandi will be provided in the main article.