ARTE: Creating art with a fully tapeless production system

Producing high-quality, multilingual programming in Europe
The Franco-German public broadcaster ARTE (Association Relative à la Télévision Européenne) broadcasts 12 hours daily of bilingual cultural programming that is broadcast in France, Germany and other European countries. It provides French content dubbed and/or subtitled in German on the German channel and vice versa. Headquartered in Strasbourg, France, ARTE also has locations in Paris and Baden-Baden – ARTE France and ARTE Deutschland GmbH, respectively. ARTE, which was founded in 1991, now has approximately 380 employees in Strasbourg alone.

The company’s mission is to create and broadcast culturally and internationally flavored TV programs that seek to promote understanding and bring people together across Europe.

From its headquarters, ARTE controls program strategy, concept and planning, and is also responsible for broadcasting and presenting programs; managing translations and subtitling; and producing informational programs, magazines and themed evenings on social issues. Within this complex multilingual environment, ARTE found it needed a modern, IT-based ingest, browse and high-resolution editing system for program production and broadcasting. Historically cumbersome and time-consuming, its previous system hindered the ability to reduce copies on tapes and manage packets for providing audiovisual material for editorial and postproduction processes. In the short term, this meant establishing a fully tapeless, networked digital production environment; over the long term, ARTE wanted to build a foundation upon which it could share media content more effectively both internally and with partner television stations.

In search of reliable support
ARTE and MCI Studio Hamburg – the general contractor and technology sub-subsidiary of the German public broadcasting group – wanted a strong partner to tackle the integration challenges of this complex solution. ARTE began the project, but encountered a critical problem when its original technology partner faced bankruptcy after implementation work had begun. As a result, ARTE and MCI sought a new partner who could recommend and implement an alternative solution. They turned to IBM to analyze the situation, evaluate options and recommend a solution.

Says Alain Schank, Deputy Technical Manager, ARTE, “We had very good, constructive contact with the team from IBM Germany. They were highly motivated and were obviously interested in and knowledgeable about the broadcast and television industry. They very quickly understood ARTE’s workflow, which was a good indicator of their aptitude for this project.”

ARTE was confident that IBM had the capabilities to salvage the highprofile project, enabling it to move all production to its new purposebuilt headquarters in Strasbourg. After a thorough review with IBM, ARTE decided that it was in its best interests to start afresh with IBM as its new technology partner.

IBM designed the solution and brought together key software application industry partnerships with its own broadcast solutions for ARTE, including IBM Archiving of Digital Media for Interactive Retrieval and Access (ADMIRA) management software and an IBM storage area network (SAN)-based storage infrastructure.

“We were confident of IBM’s stability as well as its hardware and software capabilities,” says Schank. “We were impressed with the high-quality features of System x, including its availability, reliability and scalability. And the IBM software solution was the logical choice for us. It gives us the ability to increase our archiving capacity and is evolving with our needs.”

Engaging with IBM Global Business Services
When the project began, IBM met with ARTE over the course of several months to understand in detail its system architecture, interfaces, required hardware infrastructure and workflow. IBM Global Business Services and its partners then defined new functionality in SGT Media Manager that ARTE required.

IBM led the overall integration, delivered training, worked with the users to tune the system, and administered testing.

By October 2005 ARTE began ingesting (or digitizing) its content into the system, which has been performing live playout since December 2005. Every tape arriving at ARTE is now ingested immediately, making the content available for use in new programming.

IBM Global Business Services provided a range of services, including:

• Initial requirements assessment
• Project management
• Solution design
• Pilot installation
• Adaptation and customization, including multilingual capabilities, subtitle handling, and audio and ingest functionalities to meet ARTE’s specific needs
• Systems integration and testing
• End-user training

IBM digital media experts lead a team effort
IBM brought its extensive digital media expertise to the project, as well as industry-leading hardware. The solution features IBM ADMIRA asset and asset quality management software, which controls the import, export and storage of multimedia files.

With multiserver and distributedserver support, IBM ADMIRA enables companies to scale up the number of users, system capacity and performance – offering organizations like ARTE the ability to transform their existing applications and storage infrastructure into flexible, scalable broadcast IT environments.

IBM managed the integration effort of the media asset management system using ARTE’s proprietary program planning application. Several partners joined IBM, providing both services and components to help create the overall solution, including:

• SGT Media Manager media asset management software, which utilizes IBM ADMIRA for long-term storage, partial restore/copy and other essence management services
• Ready Business Systems (RBS), which installed the hardware and software and is now providing maintenance and operational support
• INCITE non-linear editing software and Task Server for Transcoding
• Ninsight subtitling components and Video Server for HiRes Ingest
• SeaChange video playout servers
• IBM System x servers running Linux® and Windows® – providing a cost-effective, scalable, open-source single platform solution for high availability
• IBM DB2 Universal Database^TM
• IBM Tivoli Storage Manager, which is used to control the IBM 3584 LTO tape library
• IBM Tivoli SANergy, FAStT900 storage array and LTO2 tape storage

Managing a project as complex as ARTE is not without its challenges. Effective systems integration is essential, as well as having a competent partner. Notes Schank, “It is important to have a long-term, established partner like IBM, which was closely involved in nearly every aspect of the implementation. The IBM team excelled in this area, and was always ready to offer a solution to overcome any potential problems.”

Ramping up archiving capacity and predicting costs
ARTE has now transformed its production environment end to end. Although the broadcaster obviously needs to retain some tapes for back-up purposes, its production environment is approximately 95 percent tapeless. Thanks to its new archiving solution, with faster and parallel access to content, ARTE can:

• Create more programming content faster with the same amount of staff
• Eliminate process steps required for copy and transport of physical tapes
• Accelerate workflows by enabling multiple people to work with the same content simultaneously
• Digitally preserve content that was previously subject to tape-based degradation

During the first nine months, ARTE was able to ingest 5,000 hours of content, 20,000 programs and more than 100,000 files into the system: an achievement that it had originally planned would take at least two years to ingest. ARTE is now positioned to reduce costs related to production, archiving and operations – and tape-related costs – as well as eliminate traditional manual processes and centralize storage and content. IBM is helping ARTE manage future archive costs by offering ADMIRA essence management licenses per server rather than basing costs on the number of terabytes used (or volume-based licensing). The company now manages 19 hours of programs daily, a 58 percent increase from its former program production capacity of 12 hours: something it could not have contemplated with its previous system.

Moving toward the On Demand Business model
Once ARTE’s systems are fully digitized, it will be able to network with other stations to create an exchange TV production network of French and German public television. For example, it is currently working on the ability to exchange files with other broadcasters, eliminating the need to ship tapes between stations. ARTE France already offers an on demand TV service, which is independent of the media asset management and traffic system at its Strasbourg headquarters. While it plans to continue using the media asset management solution, ARTE is looking to implement a video-on-demand (VoD) service – which will be available in both French and German during 2007. And although its programming volume may fluctuate, ARTE’s goal remains the same: creating highquality, culturally significant content.

For more information
To learn more about IBM solutions and services for Media & Entertainment, contact your IBM sales representative, or visit:
ibm.com/industries/media