French broadcaster Télévision Française 1 (TF1) has awarded a contract to systems integrator Ascent Media Systems & Technology for the design and construction of its new tapeless production system for all news and sports programming, Ascent announced last week.
The new facilities will be built at TF1’s headquarters in Boulogne near Paris and will host and manage the production of all TF1 news programming as well as that of LCI, the broadcaster’s 24-hour news channel.
Ascent also will build a fully functional backup production system as part of TF1’s disaster recovery planning. This disaster recovery system mirrors the workflow of the live facility and will secure the broadcaster’s operations in the event of any downtime.
A test and development system is also being built, which will allow the broadcaster to assess updates to the system and test new platforms as they emerge. Plans call for all work to be completed in one year with initial systems becoming operational in mid-2008.
At the core of the new facility will be Dalet’s media asset management platform, which will manage the system’s entire workflow. The Dalet MAM platform will integrate with TF1’s existing newsroom computer system and archive management.
In the main system, 26 channels of video will be ingested and another 40 played out from Omneon’s server platform. In addition, Exanet’s NAS (network-attached storage) solutions will manage 96TB of redundant storage provided by DataDirect Networks across the main and backup systems.
Apple’s Final Cut Pro was chosen as the sole editing platform, and 150 workstations will be integrated into the new workflow to allow editors and journalists to edit content both on-site and from the field.
For more information, visit www.ascentmedia.co.uk.
