In the relationship between Media Content Owners and Digitization Service Providers, the Trusted Playback Service offers advantages for both parties.

Media Content Owner

• quality of playback devices used for digitization becomes transparent for the first time and can also be monitored continuously by the Content Owner
• ...

When large amounts of analog sound carriers need to be digitized, a significant improvement of quality surveillance as well as time savings can be achieved by the use of modern technology, especially when collections are recorded in standard formats and if they are of a mostly homogeneous technical quality. Since analog playback devices are usually the most error-sensitive components in a digitization system, it is essential to supervise the quality of these devices.

In order to achieve this, the Trusted Playback Service regularly receives quality metadata from a product called “Calibration-Inspector”, which is used to carry out the inspection of analog playback devices.

Based on the Calibration-Inspector measurement results, the Trusted Playback online certification service was developed. The service can on the one hand be used for internal quality management. On the other hand it can also become part of contracts between sound carrier owners who are striving for a mass digitization through outsourcing and service providers that offer this digitization service, and then be used as a means for quality surveillance.

If, for example, an archive is planning to outsource the digitization of a large tape collection, it is now possible for the first time, through the use of the Calibration-Inspector system, to explicitly define the expected quality of the digitization within the respective service level agreement (SLA). In contrast to general regulations which, for example, regulate the use of certain playback machines or the frequency of maintenance, additional objective aims or tolerances for the measurable audio quality parameters can be defined and efficiently controlled throughout the digitization project. Defining tolerances for a minimal acceptable signal-to-noise ratio or the maximum possible wow & flutter values for reel-to-reel machines ensures a monitoring of parameters which is not possible when using conventional methods.