A new global OTT
managed service launched on time under remote working restrictions validates
the strength of Red Bee Media’s relationship with client TV5MONDE, the
resilience of its team and the flexibility of the platform’s architecture.
https://theiabm.org/red-bee-media-strength-under-pressure/
Red Bee Media, one of the industry’s leading managed services providers,
was instrumental in the launch of TV5MONDEplus, the new global video-on-demand
platform serving French language series, films, documentaries and children’s
content in full HD quality to 193 countries. A project of this scale and
profile would be worthy of note under any circumstance but is even more remarkable
given it was successfully launched on deadline during this most challenging of
years.
Extending the reach of French language programming to audiences across
the globe is a central mission of TV5MONDE. The global TV network, which is
supported by the governments of France, Canada, Switzerland, Wallonia-Brussels
and Quebec, conceived of a new streaming service to deliver high quality and
free French speaking content to users worldwide.
Specifically, TV5MONDEplus is intended to promote French-speaking
content and the programs of its partner channels, TV5MONDE’s own productions,
as well as co-productions and programs acquired all over the world over
multiple device platforms.
The project was greenlit in the autumn of 2019, assigned a launch date of 09 September 2020, and put out to public tender.
Red Bee Media’s relationship with TV5MONDE goes back several years
stemming from the integration of the broadcaster’s facility to today, providing
staff to operate and engineer its playout, production and post facility. Red
Bee Media has also concluded several projects for the broadcaster.
“We have a long term and strong relationship with TV5MONDE but that was
no guarantee that they would select us for their streaming service,” says Cong
Thanh Nguyen, Key Account Manager for TV5MONDE at Red Bee. “We applied to the
RFP as we would any other public tender process and with four competitors were
invited to proceed to the next stage. It was a strict process which
included making several demonstrations of our proposed solution.”
TV5MONDE stipulated several criteria in the RFP. A key one was to be
fast to market. “They had a strict deadline and they didn’t want to spend 18
months or more to get the service up and running from scratch. They were
looking for a managed service provider.”
Secondly, TV5MONDE did not want a phased deployment. They required
availability of the service in every region from day one. “One of their
essential requirements was visibility into the management of rights to assets
published by region or by country,” says Nguyen.
In addition, the platform needed to be available on multiple devices
including the web and set top boxes and with a strong focus on mobile to cater
for audiences in territories where mobile is a major or primary means of
streaming video.
Red Bee Media won the business at the beginning of 2020, and immediately
set to work.
“They were looking for a partner that could provide a managed service
end to end including back end and front-end apps and to meet several device
types,” says Olivier Braun, Technical Product Manager for OTT at Red Bee. “Red
Bee’s managed OTT platform has been developing over five years and contains
several cutting-edge technologies. One of its core features is that it is very
modular meaning we can tailor solutions for each client from multiple building
blocks.”
The building blocks
of successful OTT
One of those building blocks is an entitlement engine which is able to
manage the rights for each individual TV5MONDEplus asset per region and per
country.
Adherence to the highest standards of content security, protection and
digital rights management (DRM) was also mandatory. All TV5MONDEplus assets are
protected according to content owner rights. Red Bee Media’s solution defines
both a MPEG-DASH and HLS source with Google Widevine, Microsoft Playready and
Apple Fairplay DRM technologies.
TV5MONDEplus is a free to view advertiser-funded model which required
integration of an ad serving solution. At RFP stage it wasn’t decided if this
were to be server-side side or client side. In the event, they chose a
client-side solution with partner France Télévisions Publicité as provider of
inventory using FreeWheel (a Comcast company) for video ads and Google for
banner and in-app ads. The back-end integration into Red Bee’s platform was
straightforward.
The service was to allow users to pause programming on one platform and
continue seamlessly on another device. This required Red Bee to build in
authentication and cross device synchronisation of content to the user’s
account. Localisation is enabled with subtitles of French language content
available in French, Spanish, English, German and Arabic. The user interface is
also localised in five languages.
An absolutely vital ingredient for TV5MONDE was video quality which had
to remain consistently broadcast standard even as bandwidth and devices varied
country to country. Red Bee used per title encoding to analyse the
complexity of individual assets for TV5MONDE in order to optimise the bitrate
ladder and produce the best quality to bitrate ratio.
“The quality of video is extremely important to the client,” says Braun.
“When we ingest content we use Adaptive Bitrate streaming (ABR) to provide
multiple bitrates which the video player can adapt based on the best available
bandwidth. All assets are available in full HD.”
On the distribution side, the service taps into the network of
TV5MONDE’s existing partner, Akamai. Since Red Bee Media’s platform is CDN
agnostic the integration of the service with Akamai’s CDN presented no
problems.
The end-user applications for the platform were built by Dotscreen using
Red Bee’s standard Software Development Kit (SDK – available in iOS, Android,
Smart TVs and Javascript), which allows for seamless connections with Red Bee’s
services for content display, playback, entitlement, analytics, security and
streaming.
Deadline delivery
under Covid conditions
The delivery date was immovable – global pandemic or not. Despite a
six-week period from March when virtually the whole of Europe was in lockdown,
Red Bee’s team kept the project on track.
“There’s no doubt that Covid-19 made everything a lot more challenging
but we were fortunate in already operating a fairly dispersed team,” says
Braun. “We have key team members in France, the UK, Sweden and Romania so we
are used to collaborating on projects remotely.
“The most severe period of lockdown happened during the specification
phase of the project when we were nailing down issues around the front-end UX
and the app’s look and feel. Those sorts of conversations are much easier when
everyone’s in the same room but on all sides we pulled together and just got on
with it.”
Another advantage to maintaining business continuity is that Red Bee’s
platform is entirely cloud-based with no need for local deployment in Paris.
TV5MONDEplus continues to evolve both technically and editorially. New
features are planned by the end of the year, to improve the user experience on
the web as well as on the IOS and Google applications. Distribution will be
extended with the TV5MONDEplus application being made available on LG and
Samsung connected TVs, then in 2021 on some American cable operators via Adobe
Prime.
Hélène Zemmour Digital Director, TV5MONDE says “Press and user feedback
since launch has been very positive. Our Francophone and Francophile audiences
appreciate this rich and free offer, in French and subtitled in 5 languages.
The catalog of more than 5,000 hours of cinema, series, documentaries,
magazines and youth programs has enabled Internet and mobile users from all
over the world to discover the diversity of French-speaking creation in Quebec,
Canada, Switzerland, Belgium, French or Africa.”
Zemmour adds, “With Red Bee Media’s OTT-platform, we got access to
first-class streaming and broadcasting expertise, as well as crucial features
such as advanced ad tech and geo-blocking functionality. This, in combination
with Dotscreen’s design expertise, allows us to offer a high-end
user-experience comparable to the biggest streaming services available. We are
looking forward to continuing this cooperation, developing TVMONDEplus for the
benefit of global audiences.”
Stéphane Grandvarlet, Head of Market Area Southern Europe and Managing
Director Red Bee France adds: “We are very proud and excited to have been a
part of this unique launch for TV5MONDE. By delivering a competitive global
streaming service, in a very short period of time and in less than ideal circumstances,
we shave showed the strength of our OTT platform and our team.”
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