"The process was slow, manual, inefficient and unacceptable, so we had to fix it."
The ABC needed to overhaul its content library — moving away from scattered warehouses, disconnected metadata systems, and five on-premise storage locations that hadn't been digitised.
The goal was to streamline workflows, enhance efficiency, and provide an accessible search experience that could locate archives in minutes instead of weeks.
The challenge
The ABC's archive spanned 91 years of Australian broadcasting history. Finding specific content meant navigating multiple disconnected systems, physical storage locations, and manual processes that could take up to three weeks to complete a single search.
The organisation needed a unified platform that could consolidate metadata, migrate petabytes of media, and deliver lightning-fast search capabilities.
The approach
The migration came in two parts:
Metadata consolidation — Multiple metadata sources were merged into a single golden record following a new format designed collaboratively with the ABC. Over three months, the process iterated with constant updates and user feedback, moving several gigabytes of metadata into AWS S3.
Media migration and alignment — Video, audio, and photo media was migrated and aligned with the newly standardised metadata. Media was organised in S3 buckets with unique prefixes and filenames matching IDs.
Intelligence at scale
Using AWS Machine Learning services, Kablamo implemented Amazon Transcribe to ingest and process archival content for transcription — reducing reliance on manual tagging. ABC audio and video archives achieved transcription accuracy exceeding 90%.
These synchronised processes moved 3 million records into the CoDA system, totalling 6 petabytes of audio, video and photo content. The strategy was extended to support ingestion and export for other systems, including live news video desk editing and live radio editing.
Results
The legacy storage systems became obsolete, with all content housed in the AWS cloud platform for scalable, remote access and ongoing cost savings.
Looking forward
Today, the ABC supports lightning-fast search, access and editing of content — with archive search time reduced from weeks to milliseconds. The CoDA platform continues to serve as the backbone of ABC's content management operations.
