Jean-Pierre Verines
PARIS—TV5 Monde is the world’s only international French-speaking general-interest network. We operate nine television channels from Paris and Montreal, providing news, documentaries, films, public affairs and entertainment programs to more than 215 million people in more than 200 countries.
Near the end of the last decade, we decided to pursue an aggressive global multi-platform strategy which would include the Internet, video-on-demand and mobile sites, with the segmenting of the latter to target specific audiences. However, we couldn’t afford to significantly increase our overhead or operational staff.
STAYING WITH A WINNER
We had already been using ProConsultant Informatique’s Louise business management system for several years for all our linear channels and pushing that partnership further only made sense. ProConsultant Informatique has always been a very reliable partner that is responsive to changing technologies and proactive in finding solutions. Furthermore, this system had already proven itself robust, highly scalable and in constant evolution, to match our evolving needs.
Given this, it was an easy decision to implement Louise’s suite of nonlinear modules within our existing workflow. They combine specialized production tools with a powerful workflow engine that automates many critical functions, ensuring accurate program delivery to nonlinear platforms, handling smooth territory-specific content management as well as geolocking.
This strategy has now been implemented with success and we can boast more than 30 nonlinear platforms worldwide. This is also why we decided to recently evolve our workflow in terms of available hardware capacity to further expand the number of nonlinear platforms that we are deliver to.
To generate content for use on video-on- demand and other nonlinear platforms, our producers use the production tools in Louise’s MediaBench module to accelerate repurposing of linear content and its assembly, in a very cost-effective way.
NEW MANAGEMENT SYSTEM INCLUDES MANY EXTRAS
MediaBench includes tools to quickly edit longer programs into shorter, web-and mobile-friendly segments, while at the same time preserving and linking appropriate metadata for all segments to the original program, thus ensuring data and rights integrity.
Short promos, including thumbnails, graphics and hyperlinks can also be created with MediaBench. Video-on-demand playlists can be generated automatically or created by dragging and dropping elements into a playlist, with makes the whole experience very user friendly.
Louise’s nonlinear modules are fully integrated and natural extensions of the core product. This made it quite easy for our production team to adapt to the new tools and package programs for the new platforms. We also save a lot of time and avoid errors, as Louise automatically transcodes the content and delivers it to the appropriate platform based on specific directives. Many other tasks can also be automated, such as retrieving content from archives and pushing content to different systems. Louise provides a reliable, robust framework to maximize all aspects of the digital workflow chain.
We’ve greatly benefitted from ProConsultant Informatique’s unique expertise and dedicated team in assisting and accompanying us through the changes in our environment. This involvement was pivotal in the successful rollout of our nonlinear strategy, and we’ve had extremely positive results and feedback.
Jean-Pierre Verines is the chief technology officer at TV5 Monde. He may be contacted atjean-pierre.verines@tv5monde.org.
For additional information, contact ProConsultant Informatique at 404-920- 0786 or visitwww.proconsultant.net.
