With the sheer volume of video content now available on the web, it’s quite easy for the average consumer to be overwhelmed. That’s where our unique combination of creative, planning and technical skills really come their own.

Commissioned to help launch Swiss public broadcaster SRG SSR’s on–demand film service, our approach was to make the navigation both user–friendly and engaging. Working with SRG SSR’s subsidiary SWISS TXT, we designed and built the service, making it available on the broadcaster’s three existing websites – TSR, in French; SF, in German; and RTSI in Italian.

Initially launching with 35 downloadable films, the service will eventually step up to over 600, with a price range of 1-6 CHF each, with payment through PayPal. The movie content was digitised and transcoded through our Digital Hive in our Broadcast Centre in West London.

To ensure editorial control for each broadcaster, we designed individual administration portals, allowing them to upload films at the click of a button, tag them with metadata (enabling the search facility) and, where appropriate, select them as an ‘Editor’s Choice’. We also created a ‘New Releases’ and ‘Top Downloads’ function, automatically updating to help guide users to content that interests them.

All films are protected by geo–IP technology to ensure that they’re available only in rights–holding territories. Once a film has been downloaded, the user has 30 days to start watching it and once the play button has been pressed they’ve 48 hours to finish viewing the film.

“We have thousands of hours of fantastic films and wanted to make them available at any time of day or night to our audience. Red Bee Media has made it easy for us to launch our on–demand film service by providing everything from the technical build to the creative design. Most importantly, its system has enabled us to stay in control of our service.”
Beat Schneider, CEO of SWISS TXT