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SBS Broadcasting

SBS Broadcasting is one of the two Dutch commercial broadcasters (the other commercial one is the IFTA-member Holland Media Group, which is part of the RTL-group).

SBS Broadcasting is the Dutch part of SBS S.A.. This holding manages several TV stations all over Europe. In the Netherlands we have 3 channels: SBS 6, Net 5 and V 8. The SBS 6 News Archive is part of Cameo Support, a 100% owned, but editorially independent, news production company of SBS Broadcasting (are you still with me?).

Cameo Support produces since 1996 on a daily basis two half-hour news programmes, which are played out on the SBS 6 channel in the early and late evening. The early edition ('Het Nieuws') provides the viewer with general Dutch and international news, the late edition with Dutch regional news: the very popular 'Hart van Nederland' (Heart of the Netherlands).

We have an extensive news archive (approx. 15000 hours) on DigiBeta. It consists for 70% of our own ENG-material and for 20% of Reuters and APTN-stuff. The rest are our news broadcast registration tapes.

The news archive is staffed with 10 full-time employees, all well-educated media librarians. In my view, this team manages one of the best catalogued TV news archives in the Netherlands. Our catalogueing goes to shot level (and of course the whole meta-data thing and rights-management). Main objective is of course internal re-use of the footage, but another task of the team is the commercial exploitation of the archive. We increasingly sell Dutch news items all over Europe.

Erik Steeghs

E-mail: erik.steeghs@cameo.nl