The customer
NRK (Norsk rikskringkasting) is Norway's public broadcaster. Every piece of music played on radio and TV has to be identified, documented and reported to the collecting societies – across dozens of channels, around the clock.
The task
In 2011 we took over the development of the DMA family of applications that NRK's music archivists, journalists and rights department work with every day:
- Archivist – the archivists' desktop client for cataloguing recordings and own productions
- DMALive – the live music reporting client for broadcast operations
- DMA Core API – the central service layer behind both, plus the database, mailer, help desk and caching services
- integrations with audio fingerprinting and the BMAT monitoring service
What we did
- 15 years of continuous development, second- and third-level support and release management
- kept the clients current through every Windows generation (Windows 7 → 11) and moved the core from .NET Framework 4.0 to .NET Framework 4.8 and the API to .NET 8
- built a REST layer so new web and AI tooling can use the archive without touching the legacy clients
Result
A mission-critical system that has been in daily production for a decade and a half, evolved instead of replaced – at a fraction of the cost of a rewrite, with the same team behind it from 2011 to 2026. In autumn 2026 NRK took the support of the platform in-house.
From the platform to the data in it
Running the platform for this long also meant working on what is inside it. Catalogue entries inherited from decades of paper-era indexing drift away from the material they describe: declared durations that no longer match, entries pointing at a digitised tape where no per-track boundaries were ever cut, recordings whose contents were never listed at all. Bringing the two back together at archive scale — analysis, evidence from the material itself, bulk correction with an audit trail — is now offered as its own service: archive data analysis and correction.