Imaginez que chaque mot prononcé dans une video soit automatiquement décodé et associé aux séquences enregistrées. Ajoutez à cela, une grille des programmes, des données d'audience en temps réel et la comptabilisation des votes d'internautes. Présentez ces informations sur un lecteur en haute définition capable de contrôler le direct et vous obtiendrez le tout dernier prototype proposé par Lab de France 24 et réalisé en collaboration avec les équipe R&d de Yacast Media et Microsoft.
A NOTER: La technologie utilisée est basée sur Silverlight (la démo necessite donc le téléchargement préalable de la dernière version du plugin adhoc)
Les contenus TV ont de plus en plus vocation à être consommés à la demande. Les possibilités de consommation de video restent un immense territoire qui reste à explorer malgré les innombrales projets de video online que nous connaissons...
En fevrier 2008 le Lab de France 24 avait mis en ligne un premier prototype qui proposait non seulement de naviguer dans les archives de l'antenne, d'arrêter et reprendre le direct mais aussi de pouvoir visualiser le début d'une emission en cours (sans attendre que celle ci ne soit terminée, puis publiée dans le catalogue VOD de la chaine). Cette application développée en collaboration avec la société Yacast était sortie sous le nom de France 24 Rewind puis France 24 Catchup.
France 24 Catchup a largement évoluée depuis 18 mois pour devenir ce prototype actuellement présenté par Microsoft à l'IBC2009.
Since its creation, France 24 has developed a 100% digital video processing system. But this bet faced several obstacles. The transition from analog video to digital video is not achieved without problems. In fact, interlaced video is a common source of confusion in the world of digital video.
A video is made up of numerous snapshots, called frames. The frame rate is the number of frames displayed each second (25 fps in PAL based system). A television, however, deals with video in terms of fields which are half of frames. Each frame consists of two fields. The “Odd field” contains the odd lines of the original frame. The second field contains the even lines.
A television displays the video field by field. The “Odd field” is displayed first then the “Even field”, and so on. Each field is displayed 1/50th of a second after the preceding field. This scan is called “Interlaced scan”.
A computer monitor performs “Progressive Scan “which means that the monitor updates the image only once for each frame of video. The two fields are displayed simultaneously.
In the other hand, there are two ways to record videos: “Progressive video” and “Interlaced video”.
In the “Progressive video”, both fields are taken in the same time and they represent the same point of time. However, in the “Interlaced video”, each field represents a different instance of time. So, in this case, each video frame is composed, as a result, of two fields taken in two different times, and does not correspond to a single instant in time.
In the case of playing “Interlaced video” on an “Interlaced screen”, it is very important to know the field order. Because the fields represent series of progressing moments in time, there can only be one correct order in which to display them. If the order is reversed, the video will quickly alternate between going forwards and backwards in time, leading to jerky motion. Because of the fact that there is not consistent field dominance (each capture card and each video source can lead to different field dominance*), the only way to know the field dominance was, formerly, to play the video on TV monitor assuming a field dominance. If the motion is jerky, then the right field order is the opposite of the assumed order. If not, the assumed order is the right one.
But, from now on, France 24 has taken the decision to establish its proper application to detect and correct the field order, without human interaction. So, we have developed a specific application of video analysis. It detects the right order of fields.
For every frame, we separate the two fields. Then we create two sets of successive fields:
-O1-E1-O2-E2-O3-E3… : “Odd field”
-E1-O1-E2-O2-E3-O3… : “Even field”
Only one of these sets represents the right chronological order. The other represents the bad order. To guess what is good and what is bad, we compare the difference of luminance between successive fields.
We notice that for one of sets, the curve of the difference of luminance by time is smooth, and for the other, this curve is rough. Also, the smooth one is situated under the rough one because the pixels are closer so the difference is smaller.
We can conclude that the green curve represents the right order, and the blue curve represents the bad one.
Once we know the field dominance, we can encode the video with the detected parameters.
It's a new school year for the Lab France 24 ! Many innovations are about to rush into the Lab in the upcoming weeks. First of all : the broadcasting of the tv-channel directly on the Internet. For the record, since the beginning of France 24, the Internet users can follow the TV-channel live on france24.com, and this in 3 languages. Now, they can install an application program, available for Windows et Macintosh (very soon for Linux), in order to watch the live feed of the TV-channel or to live-chat with other viewers. Simply download and install « Livestation », an IP-TV solution from Skinkers'. It enables viewers to watch the world's leading news channels in the highest quality, free of charge, with just one access on the Internet.
Informations about Skinkers provided by Crunchbase:
Skinkers is the UK based software developer that provides communication management software to help organisations overcome the current limitations of existing digital channels. Microsoft and Skinkers signed a technology for equity deal in 2006, a first for Microsoft in Europe. Skinkers owns the intellectual property rights for the peer-to-peer technology developed by Microsoft Research. Microsoft has a minority equity stake in Skinkers. Skinkers and Microsoft won the UK Partnering for Innovation Award this year. Livestation was released for beta testing in July to moderate reviews and is expected to be released to the general public in the fall. While it is often compared to Joost, Livestation is different in that it streams live video, as opposed to offering video On-Demand. Livestation official channels include Al Jazeera, BBC World News, Bloomberg Television, EuroNews (English, French, Italian and now Spanish), France 24, i>Tele, Russia Today and BBC World Service. A feature allowing viewers to add their own channels has just been launched and has over 400 channels already. To watch Livestation, users must download a free video player, which is available for beta testing.
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.
Since July 17, France 24 news content is available through an Iphone. You can access the service on the following website: iphone.france24.com.
Our channel has opted to privilege simplicity and speed of browsing by offering three rubrics, each providing a comprehensive view of the news:
- The “Headlines”, comprising the three leading stories followed by the first article from each major subject area.
- “Real-time newswires”, as provided by France24.com
- The “latest videos”: featuring the latest news bulletin, business bulletin and weather forecast.
The entire service is available in three languages : French, English and Arabic - you'll need to download an arabic fonts pack to see the site corectly. Special emphasis was placed on the video functions. In order to speed-up and simplify the loading process, the service provides sequences in low-speed quicktime connection (270kbs) (an optimal quality for progressive downloading on Iphone). Web developments are provided by Michel Levy Provençal’s team. Within the team, Elbou Elbechir was in charge of coding the website dedicated to the Iphone.
France24 videos are broadcast on the Iphone by means of an automatic VOD-creating system. The project is managed in-house by Francisco Simon Hernandez.
Technical details :
Web : Drupal
Video : H264 / MPEG4 in movie format at 270kb/s
More than 80% of all data in a company is unstructured information. This includes emails, word documents, paper documents, images, web pages, videos and hundreds of additional formats. Unfortunately, attempts to use this immense and strategic resource often fail because many businesses lack the requisite technology to understand and effectively utilize content that resides outside of traditional structured databases.
The question is: what to do to understand this unstructured information? And the solution is offered by automatic indexation! Or, in other words, how to structure unstructured data.
FRANCE24, uses some of the audiovisual indexation tools of Autonomy - a leading company in automatic indexation - for its archive system. Thanks to these tools, through video and audio analysis, documentary files are automatically filled out as soon as they are created. Then FRANCE24 archivists complete the files. The goal is to provide users with as much information as possible before any human intervention!
The automatic indexation used in FRANCE24 consists of several technological solutions:
Speech recognition: each video’s audio is analyzed, extracted, and indexed with the TimeCode. Even if this “speech to text” functionality is not perfect, it allows the extraction of some of the video’s concepts without any human intervention.
The Automatic Scene Detection automatically generates a storyboard, that is to say a succession of shots that represent the video. Each time a transition is recognized a shot is captured. Just in a glance, users know what the video is about.
Letter recognition: the system analyzes each image in order to detect letters or words inside the videos. So you can automatically catch the name of a guest in a program that appears on screen.
So that is what FRANCE 24 uses, but you can add many other functionalities:
Speaker tone recognition: first we train the system with the tone of the people speaking who we want to be recognized. Then the system can analyze the videos and be able to tell which speaker is talking when in the video! Great functionality when, in a debate, you search for some specific sentences of one of the panelists.
Face recognition: using the same method, we train the system with the faces of the people we want to be recognized in the videos. Then the system can analyze the videos and tell who are the people in the video and when they appear!
