FIAT/IFTA World Conference 2025

AiDitor is ORF's in-house AI lighthouse project, spearheading innovation in the area of editorial workflows and multimedia content worfklows. This cutting edge initiative aims to revolutionize the way editorial teams operate by harnessing the power of artificial intelligence to streamline processes, enhance efficiency, and unlock new creative possibilities.

At its core, AiDitor is an intelligent content workflow assistant that aggregates and integrates multiple AI services, making them accessible through a user-friendly, one-click operation interface. This centralized AI hub, that is based on individualized workspaces empowers editorial teams to leverage state of the art technologies with ease, enabling them to transcribe audio and video content, generate concise summaries, Headlines or craft engaging social media posts, and even generate entire online stories.

AiDitor's capabilities extend far beyond text-based tasks. It offers advanced video intelligence tools, such as gender analysis, enabling editors to gain valuable insights. Additionally, it provides audio enhancement features, ensuring that audio quality meets the highest standards. One of the most exciting aspects of AiDitor is its integration with the latest large language models, which serve as a powerful AI playground for the entire company.

Sign language is a crucial mode of communication for the Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing (DHH) community. However, sign language content in video archives often lacks structured indexing and accessibility, making it difficult to search, analyze, or utilize for linguistic research and education. This proposal aims to develop a computer vision-based system to automatically detect, track, and analyze sign language motions in video archives, enabling efficient retrieval and study of sign language content.

This project proposes a novel approach to enhancing sign language accessibility in video archives using computer vision and deep learning. By implementing automatic recognition, annotation, and searchability, the proposed system will provide valuable tools for researchers, educators, and the DHH community.

Although audiovisual archives have traditionally focused on preserving the final broadcast content, there is growing recognition of the strategic value embedded in the production process itself. This presentation is based on a Master’s research project that investigates how production design archives — including art direction, set design, costume design, makeup, props, and graphic design — can become assets for innovation, productivity gains, and memory preservation in media companies.

The presentation highlights how the integration of these production design assets into Digital Asset Management (DAM) platforms — combined with the use of ontologies, taxonomies, metadata governance, and artificial intelligence — enables new forms of reuse and supports strategic decision-making. These often-overlooked records hold significant potential to enrich future productions and to feed AI-based systems for metadata generation and generative content creation.

The session will discuss how aligning artistic production archives with a broader archival strategy — especially through MAM/DAM system integration — creates synergies that elevate the archive from a passive repository to a dynamic competitive resource, through interoperability between platforms. It will also address the risks of neglecting these materials, particularly in a landscape where AI tools rely on rich, diverse, and well-structured data.

Through concrete examples, this presentation aims to provoke reflection among archive managers: are we truly valuing everything that forms the history of our content? Does our organization recognize that what happens behind the scenes — the production design process — is also one of its most valuable assets?

This project explores how Italian public television has constructed the figure of the "foreigner" – colonized subject, migrant, refugee, the "other" – through the lens of the RAI audiovisual archive. The investigation focuses on a curated selection of programs and archival footage from the 1950s to the present, analyzing the evolution of language, imagery, and narrative frames linked to otherness. In the absence of television material from the colonial era, the project examines how that historical experience has been portrayed retrospectively, shedding light on how public broadcasting has either restored or erased its memory. From this starting point, the analysis moves through narratives of internal migration, immigration flows from the 1980s onward, and evolving discourses around multiculturalism, national identity, and public security.

The aim is to show how the audiovisual archive functions not only as a repository of public memory, but also as an active agent in shaping cultural categories and hierarchies. In an information-saturated world, still dominated by polarized discourse, revisiting the archival past becomes a way to reflect critically on its responsibilities in the present. Particular attention will be devoted to the language used in TV programs, highlighting how expressions such as vu cumprà (a derogatory term for migrant street vendors), extracomunitario (a bureaucratic term for non-EU foreigners, often used pejoratively), and maranza (slang for a working-class youth with stereotyped behavior and style, sometimes racialized) have helped shape a distorted and often stigmatizing imaginary. Through this focus on vocabulary and visual rhetoric, the project contributes to the broader debate on the public role of broadcast archives, not only as tools for historical inquiry, but as critical spaces for understanding the continuities and fractures in representations of the other, and for exploring the complex relationship between media, society, and alterity.

On both shores of the Mediterranean, Tunisia and Italy have a shared past. Waves of migration have followed one another for centuries between the two shores, leading to the settlement of the Italian community in Tunisia.

Migration and integration have accompanied the trajectory of Italians in Tunisia, we propose through this multi-media audiovisual and written research to present the evidence provided by the archives on the Italian-Tunisian heritage, this archive search concerned the archives of Tunisian Television, namely the two collections of television programs from the 80s “Italiet” and “Sikiliet”, on Italy and Sicily as web as the two seasons of the Ramadan soap opera “harga” from the years 2021-2022.

We also used written references from the Tunisian National Archives and the National Library, as well as online resources and books written by Italian researchers with a migratory past from the cities of Livorno, Tuscany, Sicily, and Genoa.

This research is essential for tracing the contemporary history of Tunisia and Italy, of the Italians who remained in Tunisia since its independence in 1956.

It is essential to represent the cultural framework of Italian migrants and the framework of the professions practiced in Tunisia, as well as the impact of their integration into Tunisian culture in search of a shared Mediterranean identity.

Resources:
- Tunisian Television Archives
- Archives of the National Archives of Tunisia
- Archives of the National Library
- Online Resources

Since 1959 the Netherlands have been sourcing natural Gas through a company (NAM) from under the feet of the people of Groningen. This has been a success story for more than 50 years. Working in the Natural Gas Industry was something to be proud of.

Then came the earthquakes. In the province of Groningen people started seeing cracks in their homes. It took years to get the Dutch government and the NAM to acknowledge the root cause of the problem, the mining of natural Gas.
The government decided to handle the situation, but nothing much happened. The inhabitants of Groningen that were effected sometimes had to leave their home for years.

In short, the government failed their people as was acknowledged: Between 2021 and 2023, the Dutch House of Representatives conducted a parliamentary survey on the extraction of natural gas in the Groningen field and the long-term problems that resulted from this. The aim of this survey was to gain insight into the decision-making process on natural gas extraction, earthquakes, damage handling and reinforcement.

The Groningen Archives (Groninger Archieven) has made it company policy to document everything about the mining of Natural Gas, the good years and the bad.

We have hundreds of 16mm films of the early years of Gasunie (an energy network operator. In the Netherlands. We also preserve oral history interviews. The interviews reflect the early years as well as the end years of this period. The interviews are conducted by a foundation, Ooggetuigen van de geschiedenis (Eye witnesses of history).

We were an advising party, as well as the preserving and publicising party. We want the stories of the people to be part of this archive, researchable online, and we think that we can add to truth finding and our work can help relieve the trauma of the effected people by letting them be part of the archive. Actual people with a voice and a story.

The talk will be about our future plans and idea’s for an inclusive approach to archiving.

In the Indian entertainment market, competition between television, online streaming content and film is fierce. With managers reluctant to put money where it cannot grow exponentially, broadcast archives of studios are a rarity. As large conglomerates take over smaller media houses, it appears that they are disinterested in preserving their own content, unless it functions as a commodity.

The recent surge in re-releases of older films has prompted studios to scramble for distributor copies for restoration. This is motivated by profit than genuine concern for the film’s artistic or archival significance, highlighting a power dynamic how broadcast data from private studios is valued, influenced by ‘relations of privilege and social control’. (Appadurai 1994).

But small private collectors ardently rescue, safeguard, digitize and archive broadcast collections. Applying the four types of commodities theory by Jacques Maquet (Appadurai 1994) these are ‘ex-commodities’ - materials retrieved from the commodity state and placed in some other state. Broadcast archives of large studios are ‘commodities by destination’- objects intended principally for exchange.

This paper unpacks ‘Everything is possible, and nothing is true’ in broadcast archiving by analyzing the production and archiving policies of two major production studios in the South Indian city of Hyderabad. We ask, what is the cultural and archival value of the content and material when everything is created for consumption, but nothing is deemed fit for retention? We place this treatment next to the meaning-making practices of two private film- related material archives, The Cinema Resource Centre and Archive of Indian Music in South India. With safeguarding their collection and public engagement at the core of their work, we see that individual collectors place immense social and cultural value in preservation and digitization with profits not being their mainstay and collections as ex-commodities.