France Télévisions and TVU Networks unveil hyper-mobile broadcasting at Paris 2024 countdown talk show

French national broadcaster France Télévisions and TVU Networks are working to transition the public broadcaster’s content production workflow to the cloud.

The new workflow utilises TVU’s cloud solutions for production, remote collaboration, and IFB, intercom and mix-minus management. The TVU RPS One is relied upon for synchronised 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. At the same time, we wanted a solution that also helped us meet a very important objective of reducing our carbon footprint,” stated Skander Ben Attia, engineering director, France Télévisions.

“TVU provided us with a smaller, less hardware reliant and more versatile technology solution that created the foundation for hyper-mobile broadcasting. 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.”

“We are very excited about the results we are seeing from our hyper-mobile initiative with TVU. 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,” said Romuald Rat, TechLab director at France Télévisions.

“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 26 July, France Televisions utilised hyper-mobile broadcasting for its Paris 2024 one-year countdown talk show. In total, it produced nearly four hours of live content – three hours continuously on the FranceInfo news channel and half an hour on the Paris Idf regional news journal, as well as streaming 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 synchronised 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 synchronised 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 collaboration among the team members with much of the production done remotely from a France Télévisions 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 26 July performed flawlessly,” stated 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.”

Added Oliver Martinez, director of news production at France Télévisions: ”These savings bring back to the table many productions that were discarded due to high cost or lack of resources. By 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.”