TV3, Televisió de Catalunya is the public television broadcaster of Catalonia, Spain, founded in 1983. It is part of the state-owned Catalan Corporation of Audiovisual Media (CCMA) that includes television, radio and internet media. Televisió de Catalunya’s mission is to offer all the citizens of Catalonia quality and efficient public service broadcasting, committed to ethical and democratic principles while promoting the Catalan language and culture. Efficiency will be foremost in the management of this production and broadcasting service, while striving for maximum public acceptance.
One of Televisió de Catalunya’s main objectives is to help consolidate and expand the use of the Catalan language, culture and identity, and disseminate knowledge of Catalan culture abroad, while reflecting the diversity of contemporary society. It seeks quality and innovation and strongly differentiates its output from that of other networks. At the same time, it does everything to ensure that its programs reach as many viewers as possible. Over the years, the network has won widespread international recognition for the quality of its programs. Today, Televisió de Catalunya produces and broadcasts a main generalist channel, TV3, and four different thematic channels (324, 33, Super3, Esport3), all in Catalan language. It is Catalonia’s main communication medium and the TV network that is most watched by the country’s citizens.
Televisió de Catalunya holds the most important audiovisual archive in the country. Right from the start, Documentation Department was founded with the mission of preserving its productions, both as company assets and as a cultural heritage, and managing the archive to provide a competent and effective service to internal and external users. Televisio de Catalunya has been one of the pioneer broadcasters in adapting a MAM digital system. The implementation of an in house developed digital system, DIGITION, started in 2003. Since then, the system has been extended to all production areas and has been upgraded to meet different user’s needs or to be adapted to broadcasting and technical developments. Now the system is fully operating for production, broadcasting and archiving, and is one of the company assets.
In 2006 started the process for digitizing the old archive holdings, the videotapes archive, which holds about 250,00 videotapes in different formats. It has been now digitized about 50 % of archive tapes. The digital archive holds today more than 170,000 hours of digital video, approximately 100,000 hours of digital born material and 70,000 hours of digitized old video tapes. The digital archive is widely used within the company, and this use has increased in the last few years. The latest statistics show that an average of more than 500 clips per day were retrieved from the digital archive, for different purposes: transmission, re-use, web publication, footage sales. As a result an average of about 75 hours were downloaded from the digital archive each day, that is, more than 27,000 hours a year.