French national broadcaster Radio France has announced the successful integration of Telestream monitoring and test & measurement equipment within its core broadcast infrastructure.
A combination of Telestream’s PRISM waveform monitors and Inspect 2110 monitors has enabled Radio France to safeguard hybrid SDI over IP and ST 2110 environments throughout a major technological migration.
The year 2017 saw the starting point of this technical revolution within Radio France where the broadcaster needed to radically change its legacy MADI audio switching technology.
Simultaneously, SMPTE released the ST2022-6 and ST 2110 standards, which includes PTP for timing accuracy. This was seen as the key catalyst for change.
In this project, Radio France is using Inspect 2110 and PRISM to monitor its entire network. PRISM is positioned at the end device, using ST 2022-7 (connected to both networks) and Inspect 2110 monitors all the broadcast network.
Inspect 2110 is employed to monitor the key programs: it provides an overview of all streams, while PRISM can be accessed through the Inspect 2110 user interface (UI) for in-depth analysis when required.
“Our intention is to invest for the future and not use a legacy technology,” commented Etienne Roulette, Project manager at Radio France.
“This is part of the digital plan for Radio France and the main key driver for this change is Remote Production. 2017 was the starting point, Trials and Proof of Concept (POC) in 2018, Tender in 2019. Ready to be on air later this year.”
“It has been a long path with lot of learning,” explains Etienne Roulette. “As broadcast engineers, it is not always obvious which is the best way to integrate Audio-Video in an IT environment. That’s a new experience in terms of both operations and security.”
“As 2110 is a new technology it is an essential pre-requisite to have an effective and efficient monitoring solution,” explains Pierre Gras, Audio-Video Engineer at Radio France.
“We need to be 100% sure of the robust operation of the data stream across our national network. We needed a technology partner that understands our special requirements and Telestream is the best fit for our needs.”
As broadcasters and content creators move from legacy SDI to hybrid IP, and more recently to SMPTE ST 2110 mezzanine or un-compressed video, audio and data, new and expanded audio-video quality assurance and monitoring tools are required.
These guarantee that creatives can take advantage of current and emerging options to enhance live production and make more efficient use of video and audio assets.
Combining both broad and deep analysis and monitoring of live content is achieved by combining Telestream’s PRISM and Inspect 2110 offerings.
Having been used throughout Radio France’s POC trials, Etienne Roulette believes that the Telestream monitoring solution enables the broadcaster’s team to work more effectively.
“It is so easy to access the information and monitoring data that we need remotely both from PRISM and Inspect 2110,” he explains. “We are much more efficient in our daily work.”