August 2013 www.tvbeurope.com


Canal+ concluded negotiations in July, received regulatory approval in September and needed to be on-air in December


And obviously we’re using it now to train users and in the future for rollout of new versions — and we can also use it for business continuity. “What worked? First of all,


convincing the business. This is really important, especially in a recession. The development and training system was installed for about 10% of the cost of the main system and were able to prove all of the interfaces. Then we made the video you saw earlier on, which showed the effectiveness of Mediaflex. And they bought it! “A really important thing is to


avoid feature-creep,” he said. “It’s very easy with IT systems to always add a little bit more — oh yeah, we’ll have this and we’ll have that. The problem is that your costs balloon and often you don’t necessarily get a better product in the end. Once you get the system in and running, then add new features once people become comfortable. “We brought super users to


every area — promos, broadcast media management, weather, live record, acceptance viewing,


ingest. They got involved early in the project. We developed the basic workflows and then we modified with them to make sure they were satisfied — and it meant that the business was much happier. “We had a very detailed acceptance test plan, with more than 400 test cases. That meant the project did slip a bit — it probably slipped about five weeks in acceptance testing but it was well worthwhile. We found some problems in the system and were able to solve them before it went live. “Finally, the configuration


management plan,” said Donoghue. “This system has a lot of configurations of software and firmware. The important thing is to capture that and manage the changes, both at the start when you’re doing the design and through the test phase — and indeed when you go live. You have to know what effect it is going to have on the whole system if you make a change to one element — and be able to roll back a version if you have a problem.”


The future of sports broadcast: towards


collaborative production and media delivery By Fergal Ringrose


NICOLAS DEAL is ICT V&A project manager at UEFA Information and Communications Technology. His presentation was not so much a case study on UEFA (although Deal was responsible for the Euro 2012 Poland- Ukraine ICT V&A project design), rather a forward- looking discussion on coverage of sports events, uncompressed transport of video signals, evolution of remote production and how broadcasters might better engage, enrich and extend sports content delivery to the consumer. “If we look at the difference


between the World Cup 1998 and Euro 2012, what we see is that the number of cameras has increased dramatically. The amount of equipment and staff has been increasing


TVBEurope 23


Nicolas Deal: “The cloud,


social networks, compression — all these things are really scary for broadcasters”


exponentially, which has meant a big, big increase in costs. And management people want to find ways to reduce these costs. “Rights holders all receive the same feed, but they want to try to personalise the content in some way for their audience. That’s what they really want and need – content they can adapt to their own specification.


“There are changes all


around. The capacity of the networks is increasing, and so content transport becomes easier and faster. The cloud, social networks, compression – all these things are really scary for the broadcasters,” said Deal. “And we also have the


problem of communication Continued on page 25


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