Radio Télévision Suisse (RTS) is a Swiss public broadcaster based in Geneva that produces television and radio content for Switzerland’s French-speaking population. Part of SRG SSR (the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation), RTS was founded in 2010 following the merger of Radio RSR and Television TSR and reaches around 19% of the 8.65M Swiss population daily.
In 2018 SRG decided to create more consistently in the technology platforms used across its various national business units and issued a tender for the refresh of its on-air graphics software. After a comprehensive selection process, Ross Diamond Elite partners AVC-Systems won through with the XPression suite of solutions. RTS are now using more than twenty XPression Studio engines to drive the lower-third graphics across all studios for news, sports and magazine programming, as well as its OB Vans and flight packs. According to Etienne Favereau, Senior Project Manager at RTS, there were a number of reasons for choosing Ross. “Commercially, it made a lot of sense to consolidate and work with one single vendor for graphics,” he notes. “There is a very obvious benefit to training our teams on only one solution, and that’s a far more efficient way of working. Creatively, XPression has allowed us to improve the look and feel of our graphics output and has also given us a lot of flexibility – we can change templates on the fly and make any adjustments needed in real-time. That’s been a big help to us. From a technical perspective, RTS also wanted to take advantage of the new HTML5 MOS plugin offered with XPression.”
As with any new product integration, training and familiarization were both key. “We had a number of demos with the Ross XPression team,” notes Favereau, “and we were incredibly impressed with their attention to detail, and the reassurance they gave us. Some of our team were not very familiar with XPression but it quickly became clear that Ross had answers for all of our questions and would really partner with us through the implementation process.”
Patrick Twomey, Director of XPression Graphics, is always pleased to work with a new graphics customer. “National level broadcasters are often the most demanding customers – quite understandably – and so it’s always a big compliment when yet another one chooses XPression. Our list of satisfied customers keeps on growing and we thrive on keeping each and every one of them happy!”
