RTL II

Today’s TV viewers have high expectations, programming must be constant and current.

A key player in Europe’s reality TV and docu-series market, the German TV station RTL II is stepping up to that challenge.

With in-house production and high-quality content licensing, it generates hundreds of terabytes of movie and TV programming each year. Editing and curating that content to deliver to its audience over broadcast and streaming access channels in near-real-time is the goal of RTL II.

The challenge

To succeed in meeting its objective, the company knew it would need to modify its content storage infrastructure. RTL II’s VP of IT & Services Reinhard Görtner realized their system was not fast enough, nor could it scale to reach this target.

Using the existing system, editors faced a constant uphill battle to finalize their broadcast. Upload times were slow, restricting editing work to no later than six hours before the scheduled broadcast time. Any last-minute change to information just could not make it. Because the system did not scale well, archived content was not easily accessible, further complicating editing work.

With its active video archive growing 200 terabytes per year, RTL II needed a more efficient way to scale, and the new system had to be fast and furious. Upload speeds had to increase by orders of magnitude, and the system had to scale easily to nearly any size. In addition, it needed to be completely reliable — and affordable to boot.