France Télévisions is the first French TV broadcaster with a national audience share of 30 percent (March 2012). The group is present on many platforms including the channels websites and pluzz.fr its catch-up and VOD site. It searches to always better exploit its rich program and put it at the users’ disposal.

CHALLENGES

The broadcasting industry is facing a deep shift and delinearization, with the surge of new trends in the consumption of TV content, including mobile devices, computers and connected televisions.

This is giving an unprecedented importance to metadata services, in particular program guides. Today, such services are essential to generating user interaction and engagement – whether through connected TVs, dedicated web or mobile apps and services, or social networks.

METHODOLOGY AND OUTPUTS

We’ve designed and developed a custom platform offering rich and relevant services to the France Télévisions users. To achieve this, we’ve set in place a central MongoDB database to standardize data, and an import script feeding efficiently and rapidly the database with different sources, while guaranteeing data backup. We’ve taken advantage of Elasticsearch power and its rich indexing features to quickly explore the mass of available data. Our team has also built a simple and user-friendly interface to manage and enrich the data, opened to all contributors.

Finally, thanks to a REST API built on SOA principles, we’ve created an interoperable and scalable solution that can easily accommodate new services in the future. This API allows delivering the broadcast information to all of the products using the service in a standardized way.

RESULTS

Today, the electronic program guide platform powers services like pluzz.fr the France Télévisions catch-up platform, France Télévisions’ TV Program site, the channels dedicated website, as well as other external services, some of them on tablets and smartphones. We’ve delivered a rock-solid system built around a robust core API managing a powerful database and search engine for maximum flexibility. Thanks to our expertise and proven approaches, we’ve tackled this project in less than 4 months, with a high level of quality and performance.