As the first French TV broadcaster, France Televisions knew it had to tap into its real-time information broadcasting capacity to extend online coverage to events like elections. And 2012, with the presidential and legislative elections, was a turning point for the company.

CHALLENGES

To broaden its digital presence and offering, the group was seeking to develop an application to manage and broadcast election results in real-time. This application had to be tightly integrated in other services such as francetv info, France Télévisions continuous, real-time information platform, but also other online platforms and foreign media partners – and be available on multiple devices and platforms, including desktop browsers, smartphones, tablets, and connected TVs.

METHODOLOGY AND OUTPUTS

Our team reactivity and expertise in lightweight and powerful web technologies allowed us to deliver the project in a record short design and implementation period, just before the elections. To display in a clear and concise way the election results, we’ve developed light and fluid infographics showing the information searched for by the user, whatever its device.

We also developed a fully customizable widget that can be easily and quickly embedded into any website, to ensure a broad diffusion of the application on external platforms.

We designed and implemented an intuitive back-office to manage all of the data streams and display the most accurate data at a given time.

The application had to be solid and capable of handling high workload peaks on the election weekend: for the data import and processing we’ve chosen NoSQL solutions and asynchronous processing. For the front, we’ve implemented cache mechanisms and realized many workload tests before the delivery to guarantee the stability and performances.

RESULTS

af83 delivered in only four months an extremely powerful and solid application available on many devices - desktop browsers, smartphones, tablets and connected TVs. Tens of millions of pages were perfectly and smoothly displayed during and after the presidential and legislative elections. The responsive and intuitive interfaces for end-users, featuring dynamic infographics and an integrated experience across all devices, as well as the widget, built the application success among the general public and medias: it have been adopted by leading media sites worldwide, including The Wall Street Journal, The Telegraph, El Pais, Le Soir, Il Corriere della Serra.

(Images, courtesy of France Televisions)