CUPERTINO, Calif.—French national public television broadcaster, France Televisions is working with TVU Networks to help it transition its content production workflows to the cloud.
The new workflow utilizes TVU's cloud solutions for production, remote collaboration, and IFB, intercom and mix-minus management, the TVU RPS One for synchronized multi-camera live content capture, and 5G networks plus two Starlink Maritime units for transmission and data aggregation.
"We were searching for a more flexible approach to live story coverage which would allow us to rapidly overcome accessibility challenges often encountered by our field crews,” explained Skander Ben Attia, engineering director, France Televisions. “At the same time, we wanted a solution that also helped us meet a very important objective of reducing our carbon footprint."
"TVU provided us with a smaller, less hardware reliant, and more versatile technology solution that created the foundation for hyper-mobile broadcasting,” he added. “We no longer need to rely heavily on traditional extensive and complex infrastructure for news capture while also becoming much faster to go live and more carbon friendly."
The upgrade is part of an effort to offer hyper-mobile broadcasting at Paris 2024 Summer Olympics.
"We are very excited about the results we are seeing from our hyper-mobile initiative with TVU,” said Romuald Rat, TechLab director at France Télévisions. “We have been able to produce high quality multi-camera live events or breaking news from any location despite challenging circumstances – hardware failures, an entire system down, war zones or deserted areas. With only batteries and cameras in hand and powered by the latest generation of 5G with Starlink and TVU bonded cellular transmission equipment, the reporting team has the tools it needs to rapidly conduct a live newscast anywhere in the world and cover stories from any angle – traditional and new."
On July 26th, France Televisions utilized hyper-mobile broadcasting for their Paris 2024 1-year countdown talk show. In total, they produced nearly four hours of live content – three hours continuously on the 'franceinfo' news channel and a half hour on the 'Paris Idf' regional news journal, and also streamed live on Twitch.
The multi-location and multi-camera event took place in Paris aboard a moving boat with limited space. A five-camera setup involved four cameras positioned on the boats and one camera mounted on a motorcycle following the action along the Seine River. In addition, two more live broadcasts were taking place in separate locations in Paris and Ukraine. All were done using the TVU RPS One and TVU One transmitters. The seven live feeds were seamlessly synchronized in TVU Producer's cloud production platform, with zero execution delay.
The broadcaster used two Starlink Maritime systems and the 5G network to help counteract the challenges of cellular bandwidth on the moving boats.
The TVU RPS One backpack transmitter with 5G modems was used to transmit synchronized signals from multiple cameras to the TVU remote cloud production platform, aggregating 5G and Starlink connectivity.
A motorcycle on land was also equipped with a TVU One 5G transmitter for capturing additional footage.
The TVU Producer cloud-based platform served as the backbone of the production, facilitating seamless collaboration among the team members with much of the production done remotely from a France Television studio.
In addition, camera feeds were transmitted as a redundancy to both the TVU Producer cloud platform and the studio, providing automatic backup in case of unforeseen circumstances and ensuring uninterrupted broadcasting.
"The live show on July 26th performed flawlessly," stated Romuald Rat. "Beyond the benefits of enhanced storytelling and flexibility, lies also the important savings made on the technology cost, with the TVU Transmitters powered by Starlink and 5G, combined with the seamless integration of cloud components in the production process, we estimate that we can easily achieve savings of at least 30%, allowing us to produce a lot more content as well as content we could simply not get access to."
“These savings bring back to the table many productions that were discarded due to high cost or lack of resources,” added Oliver Martinez, director of news production at France TélévisionsBy reducing the onsite requirements of bigger productions and achieving cost savings in travel and set up times, we can leverage the use of internal teams for covering more events and more content for very demanding viewers."
