Submitted by France 24 on Tue, 09/02/2008 - 16:18.
The nonstop news channel developed its own VoD platform, in order to bring video content taken from its programs on its websites in less than 15 minutes, without any human intervention.
How was born your VoD platform's project in France 24?
Fréderic Brochard: The need came into existence on the first days of 2006, in order to go with the launch of the TV-channel, in December the same year. It was necessary to automate the on-lining of videos on our Vod platform, in such a way that manual tasks would be reduced, or even no longer required at all. We began with a simple method that involved recording broadcast programs, and editing them manually in order to select a dialogue that we were particularly interested in. But these steps still had to be done manually and were repeated on a daily basis.
So, at the beginning of 2008, we contacted the company Mediatvcom. We wanted to be able to edit the broadcast material from a recording, to transcode the content and then to publish it automatically, both on the standard website and on the mobile web section. Then, this content is given out to our partners in the various languages of the channel: English, Arabic and French. Today, we reached an entirely automated solution. We just decide at the beginning of the process on the video format with our partners. This allows us to publish more videos than before.
Which solution did you choose, and why ?
Fréderic Brochard: We looked at the tools available on the market, and chose to reuse an existing tool, in order not to have to start again from scratch. The tool had to settle in the broadcasts without interfering with the recordings. It also had to be able of controlling and configuring VoD output, and of offering administrator and user layers. The platform works completely on the basis of a digital process, with no need for tapes. It is processing stories produced by TV control rooms as well as isolated AVID output. It handles transcoding, meta-data, and brings out stories to their recipients.
Now, we are able to publish from 300 to 400 stories per day, in any France24 language and in any formats. The platform works directly from using information that it extracts from the control room's computers. A storage server is used to carry out the intermediary tasks required before the videos can be delivered. Programs are available on VoD online 12 to 15 minutes after broadcast. This fast response time is very important to us as we are a non-stop news channel. France24 can bring out content to new partners within several minutes, on the basis of generic XML files.
What do you learn from this project?
Fréderic Brochard: The tool is very powerful, but also very simple in its design. This is what has allowed us to be quickly operational and reliable. We didn't make a kludge out of it, and this fits perfectly with the size of our company. It was important to have a partner to create this robust infrastructure. Furthermore, we have now access to several areas where we can develop, including publishing stories which have not yet been broadcast on air, distributing more content per day, etc. I think we're just at the beginning, as for the distribution process - the platform could handle more.
VoD is an essential feature for France24. We are not a paper publication like Le Monde, for example. Our job is to produce video content, and therefore to make it available on as many media as possible: television, Internet, and perhaps other media in the future. We don't use our VoD platform to have a web presence, or to be trendy, but to comply with our policy of distributing multi-format content.
Fréderic Brochard is CTO at France 24.
Olivier Julien, Chairman of Mediatvcom, was also involved in this interview.
Article published in french in "Le Journal du net" (on July 21st)
