Las Vegas, NAB – Content providers, media and entertainment companies are faced with growing demands for more high-quality content and interactive media experiences on more screens. To deliver this involves digitizing legacy production operations, adding more camera feeds, higher screen resolutions with 4K, supporting virtual reality experiences, updating security and much more. 

BOULOGNE (CANAL+), a division of Vivendi Group, and top producer of premium TV programming in France, is working with Cisco to transform its live media production facility, the newly built “CANAL Factory,” which houses its two media production studios that produce 170 live shows per month. The companies have implemented an all-IP infrastructure to gain the scale, flexibility and reliability that the existing standard digital interface (SDI) infrastructure cannot provide.

To enable the migration from SDI to IP, Cisco is working with leading software provider partners including Grass Valley, as well as video systems integrator Videlio.

Cisco is providing its Media Blueprint – a set of infrastructure and software solutions that powers cloud scale media experiences. The project features the Cisco^® IP Fabric for Media solution, based on Cisco Nexus^® 9000 switches and SDN Controllers and Cisco Advanced Services. The new network infrastructure offers CANAL+ the reliability to run live production over IP, scaling to support 12 Tbps of traffic with the agility to rapidly reconfigure production environments, as well as simplified redundancy.

“IP transformation is strategically important to CANAL+, and represents a major innovation for live broadcast production in Europe,” said Ralph Atlan, CTO, CANAL+ Edition. “Cisco’s roadmap and architecture flexibility, with support of our broadcast partners, ensured that our production workflows remained unchanged as we transition. This new IP foundation will allow us to boost production reliability and flexibility for live programs and enable our broadcast network to offer new programs faster - including 4K resolutions.”

“Cisco and CANAL+ have a long history of collaboration across enterprise networking, and in the production of video,” said Yves Padrines, vice president, Global Service Provider EMEAR, Cisco.“The proven reliability of standardizing on Cisco IP for the enterprise helped CANAL+ with the decision to transform its live broadcast production in the same way. We maintainted a similar approach to what was being replaced, so CANAL+ will feel as if there is no change in its workflow or operations of broadcast controllers and applications.”

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