France Télévisions Enhances Channel Playout With Harmonic, LORA Solutions

Harmonic and LORA Solutions, a French company that offers turnkey solutions for the broadcast industry, have provided France Télévisions with a comprehensive scheduling and playout system that enables efficient, highly automated preparation and delivery of the broadcast channel Nouvelle Calédonie 1ère. Optimizing the playout workflow, this system facilitates cost-effective provision of richly branded programming.

Installed at France Télévisions facilities in New Caledonia, the integrated solution unites Harmonic’s Spectrum ChannelPort integrated playout system and Polaris Play channel-in-a-box (CIAB) automation system with LORA Solutions’ traffic system to simplify and streamline branded channel playout, driven primarily from France Télévisions facilities in Malakoff, near Paris.

“The robust traffic and playout systems offered by LORA Solutions and Harmonic, as well as the companies’ expertise and their experience in developing tightly integrated solutions, have made it easier and more affordable for us to deliver a rich broadcast product on Nouvelle Calédonie 1ère,” says Erwan Roth, deputy managing director in charge of production and technologies at France Télévisions. “The companies worked in partnership to meet our requirements and deliver all the functionality our operations demand.”

The LORA Solutions traffic system not only manages contribution of video between France Télévisions’ New Caledonia and Malakoff sites, but also creates lists of clips to be recorded from the broadcaster’s SDI-contribution or VTR feeds and subsequently sent to Harmonic’s Polaris Play automation system. Providing a rich set of automated ingest, media preparation and playout workflow capabilities, Polaris Play runs as an embedded automation solution directly on Harmonic’s Spectrum MediaDeck media server featuring the ChannelPort system for branded channel playout.

“Clear communication between France Télévisions, Harmonic and LORA Solutions at every step of the project made it possible to design and integrate a simple, efficient solution that’s an exact match for the needs of Nouvelle Calédonie 1ère,” says Eric Aubry, product manager at LORA Solutions.

“Harmonic’s Polaris suite is designed to aid broadcasters in consolidating and simplifying their playout workflows,” says Ian Graham, vice president of EMEA sales at Harmonic. “Working in tandem with LORA Solutions’ traffic system, Polaris Play provides France Télévisions with an efficient and cost-effective solution for branded playout.”