Huawei Media Cloud Enables Omni-media Opportunities for TF1

SHENZHEN, China, Aug. 1, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Huawei provided the Huawei Media Cloud Solution, which enabled a private cloud IT platform for Television Francaise 1. The platform enables Omni-media content production and broadcasting anytime and anywhere.

"Huawei's VDI technology enabled us to put workstation into the cloud and access it quickly. We can now operate the same application software in a convenient way, using a simple terminal. We have deployed a more efficient solution in the newsroom, allowing staff to work flexibly to drive a seamless Omni-media user-experience.″ Guillaume Lemoine, Senior Broadcast Architect, TF1 group.

Background

Founded in 1935, Television Francaise 1 is the largest TV station in France and one of oldest operating TV stations globally. In 1975, it was rebranded TF1 and was privatized in 1987. With many specialized cable TV stations, TF1 enjoys a 24% audience rating, making it the number-one TV station in France and one of the most popular in Europe. It has implemented some of the most advanced technology in Europe to ensure smooth running operations.

Challenges

TF1 uses digital and IP-based technology to produce and broadcast the news. Its network supports the production and broadcasting of news programs in high-definition (HD) or standard-definition. The traditional TV news and the Internet are mixing, while the traditional news production methods struggle to meet the requirements for a fast and seamless experience.

TF1 was challenged in the following ways:

1. Low utilization of media assets:  Independent IT infrastructure for multiple channels stifled information sharing. If the news channel needed to use video resources from the sports channel, the user needed to utilize an additional server to copy the videos to the storage system. The process was time- and bandwidth-consuming.
2. Frequent switchovers between office and production desktops affected efficiency: A journalist needed two desktops -- one for processing emails and Internet searches, the other for media editing, which was usually located in another area. Journalist needed to move between two areas, which impeded ability to deliver timely news productions.
3. Low resource utilization resulted in long Time-to-Market (TTM) for services and channels: TF1's flexibility was hampered by existing infrastructure with isolated IT resources across major services, including ingestion, editing, broadcasting, media asset management, and content archiving. The delivery of new services was complex and delayed. The procurement of new hardware and software was lengthy.

"We had seven channels at different sites, but resources couldn't be shared between them. To meet the growing demand for Omni-media services, we needed a unified news factory built on private cloud, similar to that of Shenzhen Media Group, to enable resource sharing and scalability. We wanted to evolve to new architecture that supported the sharing of media assets based on hybrid cloud," said Nicolas, IT Architecture Director, TF1 Group.

Above all, TF1 was in urgent need of a converged platform that supported Omni-media services.

Solution

In March, 2016, Huawei provided an end-to-end integrated media cloud solution that covers underlying servers, upper-layer cloud platforms, and desktop software and hardware. Huawei Media Cloud Solution enabled a private cloud IT platform for TF1 to support media-service-defined IT resource pooling, and service automation. The platform enables Omni-media content production and broadcasting anytime and anywhere, bringing a convenient experience.

TF1 captured new opportunities:

Distributed storage enables efficient content sharing: Huawei converged resource pool adopts a distributed architecture and contains all media materials, which means internal high-speed data copying will no longer occupy bandwidth. With global data sharing between multiple channels, free data flow within the resource pool replaces traditional data migration between multiple systems, which significantly improves data access efficiency.

GPU + VDI unified OA platform for ingesting and editing, significantly improves news production efficiency: The desktop cloud system provides a solution with 80 GPUs and 160 VDIs. Each user is allocated two virtual desktops on the cloud, which not only satisfies the needs of email processing and HD news editing, but also ensures information security using DMZ security isolation technology.

Hyper-converged architecture provides IT resource pools and supports service automation, significantly reducing time required for service rollout: E9000, a hyper-converged architecture blade server, is used to achieve on-demand resource allocation and automatic scaling based on ISV service template, which improves deployment efficiency for HD editing, media broadcasting, on the media cloud (such as Dalet, a news-editing software; and Adobe, an image-processing software).

Benefits

Within 4 months, TF1 built a converged news production platform based on Huawei Media Cloud Solution, which supported current service requirements while enabling future development:

• Access efficiency to shared media data has improved by 90%.
• Full-time news production significantly improved efficiency by 50%.
• TTM of news services has shortened by 50%.

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