The Austrian Broadcasting Corporation (ORF) is Austria’s largest media provider, operating four national television and nine regional radio channels, as well as a comprehensive range of websites. ORF is formally a foundation under public law and as such must fulfil a number of duties and mandates laid down in the ORF Act. Being a public service radio and television company, ORF is not profit-oriented, and invests all revenue – half of which comes from radio and TV licence fees, the rest from advertising and other income – directly into the programmes and services it provides to its ORF audiences. The ORF’s main headquarters and studios are located in Vienna, and the company also operates regional studios in all nine Federal Provinces and maintains a worldwide network of correspondents who contribute to its varied range of programmes in all three media.
The ORF’s websites post the country’s most coveted online news, also providing in-depth background information and a comprehensive set of services. Moreover, the „ORF-TVthek“ features a 7-day catchup of most television formats, allowing viewers to watch the programmes they missed online. The TV Archive of ORF holds over 2.3 million items of film and video material (~ 1,200,000 hours) ranging from shots of the late emperor Franz Joseph to yesterday’s breaking news. Documentation and Archives also runs a specialized audio-archive for TV-purposes (M&E) (~ 1M hours) More than 80 documentalists, archivists, editors, historians, sound-engineers, system-developers and administrative staff work in the TV archives, handling and annotating a daily material increase of about 45 hours, including digitisation and making it available for browsing purposes to all producing departments within ORF.