The RTL Group is a giant amongst giants in the media and entertainment sector. Based out of Luxembourg, they have interests in 61 television broadcasters and 30 radio station in over 10 countries.
In November 2019 RTL Croatia, as part of the RTL Group, completed a major evaluation of the newsroom computer market and decided to implement an Octopus Newsroom system that went into production an impressive 4 weeks later.
RTL Croatia with national coverage of three linear channels, four IPTV channels, and one channel for Croatian diaspora along with its other diversified activities is the biggest media company in the country. The main channel, RTL with up to 3 major news broadcasts per day is covering both domestic and international news.
The Head of News Controlling at RTL, Ines Čović-Pavišić explains “Though we felt our current news workflow worked well, we knew our existing system was outdated. It didn’t have social media integration so we wanted a platform that could incorporate evolving news delivery strategies.”
Čović-Pavišić continues “On evaluating Octopus we found it to be the most user-friendly system on the market with the unique ability to mimic our current workflows and layouts. Furthermore, Octopus is already present on our market, so there is a substantial knowledge base of the system in Croatia.”
Octopus worked closely with RTL to customize the integration to match their existing workflow while giving them new opportunities to improve efficiency allowing Octopus to be used on a range of desktops and mobile devices across a range of different operating systems both in the office and out in the field.
The main Octopus system is being hosted and used from their HQ in Zagreb, Croatia. There are six remote correspondent offices that remotely connect to HQ and twenty journalists are regularly using the mobile app. This has been found to be extremely beneficial during breaking news, coverage, material ingest and can provide accurate timecode logging.
Čović-Pavišić concludes “Octopus helped us repurpose our news delivery across all of our platforms including traditional broadcast, online and mobile and has successfully consolidated our news management process throughout the company. We were super pleased with the Octopus delivery team. We would have to emphasise Eva Planickova as a key person who managed to train our staff as well as reassuring them that the migration could be completed in a very short time. Furthermore, Milan Varga was of great help and support in a very complex integration with VizRT and IMC Incite.”
In the future RTL will also be looking at potentially deploying the Octopus Kör as a cloud platform with many key collaboration features to complement their existing Octopus Newsroom system. The key feature for RTL will be to utilize Kör to analyse multiple information news sources in real time but with the benefit of AI for better predictive and targeted searches for all its users.