RTV Monitor
RTV Monitor is a Dutch media monitoring service that tracks radio, television, podcasts and public political debates around the clock. Speech-to-text, on-screen text detection and logo recognition turn broadcasts into searchable fragments delivered as real-time alerts.
What is RTV Monitor?
RTV Monitor is a broadcast media monitoring service run from Hilversum in the Netherlands. It watches and listens to radio, television, podcasts and public political debate continuously, and turns what is said on air into text a customer can search, filter and subscribe to. The company describes the work as earned media monitoring: not what an organisation publishes about itself, but what other people broadcast about it.
The technical core is a stack of AI components the company names openly: speech-to-text to transcribe spoken audio, on-screen text detection through OCR, object and logo recognition inside video, an intelligent database, and what it calls smart noise filtering to keep irrelevant hits out of the results. Searches run through an in-house engine the company calls RTV Search, which accepts plain keywords, filters on content type, channel and date, and full Boolean queries for advanced users. A written guide to the query language exists and is sent on request.
Two deliverables sit on top of that engine. RTV Updates are automated real-time alerts filtered out of broadcast streams by speech recognition. RTV Summaries are written by the RTV Monitor team, cover the whole fragment rather than the matching sentence, and are delivered within two hours of broadcast. Every alert carries the audio or video fragment itself, a transcript or summary, the search terms that matched, the medium, the source channel and programme name, the date and the time. The archive can be searched freely one year back, and further on request.
The published 2026 channel list runs to roughly 139 entries: Dutch national and regional television, national, regional and music radio, sports channels, NPO Politiek, Tweede Kamer plenary and committee sessions, French-speaking and Flemish Belgian channels, and a selection of podcasts. The company also states it monitors Austrian channels. Sources can be extended on request.
RTV Monitor B.V. has been part of SoundAware Group since 2019, alongside SoundAware, Adfact and TRCKtrace; Media Distillery Monitoring joined the group in July 2020 and its monitoring activity was folded into RTV Monitor. The company says it serves more than 500 businesses, organisations and public institutions across Europe.
What it does
- Monitor Dutch and Belgian radio and television live, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year
- Convert broadcast speech to searchable text and surface every mention of a name, brand or topic
- Follow public political debate, including Tweede Kamer plenary sessions and committee meetings
- Search the media database with keywords, filters on content type, channel and date, or Boolean queries
- Receive alerts in real time or on a fixed schedule, in the dashboard or by email
- Detect on-screen text and recognise logos and objects inside video footage
- Feed monitoring results into a third-party platform through RSS or the API
When to use RTV Monitor / When not to
A quick filter to help you decide if RTV Monitor is the right fit.
When to use RTV Monitor
- PR and communications teams tracking how a brand or organisation is talked about on air
- Public affairs and political staff following Tweede Kamer plenary sessions, committee meetings and NPO Politiek
- Compliance, KYC and CDD analysts adding adverse media from broadcast sources to their screening
- Newsrooms, editors and news researchers who need a searchable archive of what was actually said
- Marketing and insights teams measuring earned media coverage across Dutch and Belgian channels
When not to use RTV Monitor
- Teams that need social media listening: RTV Monitor states plainly that it does not cover social media
- Teams that need print or press clipping: written press is explicitly out of scope
- Buyers who need a published price before talking to a salesperson, since no rate card exists online
- Organisations outside the Netherlands and Belgium, where the standard channel line-up offers little coverage
- Anyone who needs contractual documents up front: no terms of service or DPA is published on the site
How to use RTV Monitor
A typical end-to-end flow, from setup to results.
- Request access from the free demo page or by emailing sales@rtvmonitor.nl
- Receive the activation link and open the dashboard at dashboard.rtvmonitor.nl
- Start the seven-day free trial, which the team sets up after you fill in the form
- Type a name or a subject into the search bar to query the media database
- Narrow the result with the filters on content type, channel and date
- Write Boolean queries directly in the search bar once you need finer control
- Ask the 24/7 support team for the query-language guide if the syntax is new to you
- Open a result to read the transcript, see the recognised logos or text, and play the fragment
- Subscribe to notifications in one click, either in real time or at fixed times of day
- Route alerts into an existing monitoring platform over RSS or the API, or request extra channels
Pros & Cons
Pros
- Genuine specialisation in a narrow field: broadcast, podcasts and public political debate
- Covers regional and local broadcast sources that never make it online, and often reports news before it does
- Publishes a dated 2026 channel list, which most monitoring vendors keep private
- One year of archive searchable at no extra cost, and further back on request
- Personal support included, reachable around the clock, including help writing queries
- RSS and API output make it a component of a wider monitoring stack rather than a walled garden
- Seven-day free trial with no strings attached, and source selection that can be extended on request
Cons
- No published pricing at all: the FAQ sends every cost question to the sales team
- No terms of service, general conditions or disclaimer anywhere on the site
- No data processing agreement is published or even mentioned
- No security certification is displayed; the FIBEP and AMEC logos are trade association memberships, not certifications
- No hosting country or region is disclosed for customer data
- The site contradicts itself on geographic scope: Austria on the English home page, Germany on the compliance page, and neither in the 2026 channel list
- Two dead links in production, including the English footer link to the privacy statement
Pricing & Plans
RTV Monitor publishes no prices. There is no pricing page on the site and none in the sitemap, and the FAQ answers the cost question by directing the reader to the sales team for all options and prices. There is no permanent free plan. The only free access is a seven-day trial, arranged through the registration form or by email, after which the team makes contact. No entry-level amount, currency or billing unit can therefore be quoted from first-party sources, and prospective buyers should expect a quotation built around their chosen source selection and delivery method.
Data, GDPR & hosting
A consolidated view of how RTV Monitor handles your data.
GDPR overview
RTV Monitor claims GDPR compliance in so many words, in both language versions of its privacy statement: it says it observes the relevant privacy laws and regulations, the General Data Protection Regulation among them. Five concrete commitments follow: purposes documented in advance, data minimisation, explicit consent where consent is required, security measures that are also imposed on parties processing data on its behalf, and respect for data subject rights. All six GDPR rights are listed, with a stated response time of 30 days, extendable. A complaint may be filed with the supervisory authority, and contact runs through contact@rtvmonitor.nl. The claim is not backed by any certification, audit report, data processing agreement or trust page. As a Dutch company, RTV Monitor B.V. needs no Article 27 representative and names none.
Who owns the data?
RTV Monitor publishes no terms of service, so no contractual clause on ownership of customer data is available to read. The only document that addresses personal data is the privacy statement, and it covers the www.rtvmonitor.nl website rather than the monitoring platform itself. Within that scope, RTV Monitor B.V. acts as controller for newsletter and contact-form data, states that it does not pass personal data to companies other than the parties it names, except where legally compelled, and lists the full set of GDPR data subject rights: access, rectification, objection, erasure, portability and restriction. Ownership of the media fragments, transcripts and search histories generated inside the product is not addressed anywhere on the site.
Reuse rights
Nothing on the site tells a customer what they may do with the alerts, transcripts and audio or video fragments the service delivers. There is no terms of service page, no licence clause and no re-use or redistribution policy, which matters here because the material is broadcast content owned by third-party channels rather than by RTV Monitor. For the website itself, the privacy statement is explicit: name and address details plus an email address are used for the newsletter on the basis of consent and kept until the subscriber unsubscribes; contact-form data is used to answer the enquiry and kept until the sender is satisfied. Location data is requested separately and only obtained with consent. Mailchimp is named as a recipient established outside the EU, and Google Analytics is used with IP addresses explicitly not anonymised. Anyone planning to republish monitored fragments should settle rights in the contract.
Data retention & training
Hosting summary
RTV Monitor discloses nothing about where customer data is hosted. No country, no region, no cloud provider and no data centre is named on any page of the site, and there is no trust or security page where such information would normally sit. The only infrastructure statement is a passing reference on the About page to serving customers from the cloud. The privacy statement, which covers the marketing website rather than the platform, names Mailchimp as a party established outside the EU for newsletter handling, and Google Analytics with IP addresses explicitly not anonymised. The marketing site itself resolves to a Dutch IP address hosted by Signet B.V. in Lelystad, but that describes the WordPress site and says nothing about where monitoring data, transcripts or media fragments live. Buyers with a data residency requirement will need to raise it directly, since the jurisdiction cannot be established from public sources.
Things to keep in mind
Risks and trade-offs to weigh before adopting RTV Monitor.
- No contract is readable before you sign: there is no terms of service, no general conditions and no disclaimer online
- No data processing agreement is published or mentioned, although customers subject to the GDPR will need one
- Nothing states where customer data is hosted, in which country or under which jurisdiction
- The privacy statement covers the marketing website, not the monitoring platform, so the product's own data handling is undocumented
- The site never addresses whether customer data or queries are used to train models, so there is nothing to opt out of and nothing ruled out
- Broadcast fragments and transcripts are third-party content; re-use and redistribution rights are not covered anywhere on the site
- Alert fatigue is a real risk with 24/7 real-time notifications: a poorly written query can bury the signal, which is why the query-language guide and support matter
Setup & Integrations
Technical difficulty
Getting started is easy. There is nothing to install: an account is requested through the form or by email, an activation link follows, and the dashboard runs in a browser. Basic searching needs no training. The real learning curve is in the queries, where Boolean syntax rewards precision; a written query-language guide is available on request and support helps build them, which the company offers around the clock. Integrating results into another platform over RSS or the API is a genuine engineering task, and it has to be scoped with the vendor because no public API documentation exists.
Deployment
Supported languages
Behind RTV Monitor
Social
Resources
All the official URLs gathered for verification and reference.
Frequently asked questions
What does RTV Monitor actually monitor?
Does RTV Monitor cover social media or the printed press?
How much does RTV Monitor cost?
What is the difference between RTV Updates and RTV Summaries?
How are alerts delivered, and what do they contain?
Is there an API?
How far back does the archive go?
Which AI techniques does RTV Monitor use?
Who is behind RTV Monitor?
What support is included?
Should you pick RTV Monitor?
RTV Monitor is a focused product that knows exactly what it is not. It monitors broadcast: radio, television, podcasts and public political debate, and it says plainly that social media and print are somebody else's job. That discipline is its main strength. The AI it runs is real and named rather than decorative, turning spoken audio into searchable transcripts and reading text and logos out of video, and the published 2026 channel list shows an unusual willingness to be pinned down on coverage. A year of freely searchable archive, personal support around the clock, and RSS and API output that let the service slot into a wider monitoring stack round out a credible offering for PR teams, public affairs staff, newsrooms and the compliance analysts the company courts on its dedicated KYC and CDD page.
The reservations are all about what is missing from the website rather than from the product. There is no price anywhere, no terms of service, no data processing agreement and no security certification; the two association logos on the home page are memberships, not audits. Nothing states where customer data is hosted, and the privacy statement covers the marketing site rather than the monitoring platform. The site also contradicts itself on whether it reaches Austria, Germany or neither, and carries dead links in production, including the English footer link to its own privacy statement.
For a buyer who already knows they need broadcast coverage in the Netherlands and Belgium, RTV Monitor is worth the conversation, and the seven-day trial costs nothing to take. Expect to ask for the contract, the hosting arrangements and the price in that conversation, because none of the three is available before it.
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