France Info enters the digital era

At 8 p.m. on 21st February 2000, France Info did its first minutes of fully digital programme broadcasting. This technological revolution at France Info is the first step in an overall modernisation policy adopted by the parent station Radio France. All the Radio France stations should have gone fully digital by 2002.

When the system architecture was being designed, Sylvain Anichini, assistant managing director at Radio France in charge of development, decided to opt for long-term solutions which have proved their worth when successfully used by many radios. So NETIA was asked to design the global system architecture using its Radio-Assist range and, in particular, its software for production (Creator) and broadcasting (Odyssey); NEXUS was chosen for the editorial tool, SONY and EMC2 for archiving, Communication & System for overall integration and Bull for the ATM network side, for any future extension of the system allowing Radio France stations to share documents.

Top-level broadcasting tools.
In its new broadcasting preparation product, Director, Nétia has come up with a set of modules especially designed for the requirements of network head radios like France Info. Feder-All is the result of extensive thinking on the scheduling and planning which is the daily work of all radio stations.
Now there are several modelling levels for building templates and playlists, there is no more need for repetitive tasks. The effectiveness of this tool lies in its capacity to merge music, advertising and news playlists into a single global playlist.
Feder-All is the perfect tool for scheduling; France Info has chosen it because it integrates all the new multiple broadcasting technologies: simultaneously and for one or more radios.

The purpose of Director is to make it easier to prepare a perfect broadcast. It has several security strategies ensuring immediate transparent action whenever failure occurs: manual or automatic smoothing of constraints in all schedule templates, simultaneous updating of data on all broadcast monitoring workstations and supervision of broadcast workstations in operation.
For its broadcasting work, France Info has had Nétia install the Odyssey program. This product is a set of broadcasting modules designed for specific network head radio multiple broadcasting requirements (8 stereo channels and 2 PFL playbacks). It is built with Feder-All and all daily dynamic additions can be made by drag & drop from any workstation (editing, station head, editorial desk, etc).

Production tools especially designed for news
With NETIA's Creator product, several technicians or journalists can share a document and do different editing work at the same time. This makes the system highly flexible and productive, while saving a considerable amount of time.

The Snippet tool is the result of years of experience in radio production work and its design is the outcome of a joint effort by radio technicians and journalists. The purpose of this new tool is to provide all digital audio editing techniques in a single screen for greater speed and user-friendliness. From now on, journalists can amass sounds in the radio's central database, put them together and edit them for their reporting needs, all this from any workstation. The time this saves in editing work means that France Info can broadcast its news flashes even more quickly, because of the very short lapse of time between the report production and its broadcast.

The change to digital : a technical revolution for the benefit of everyone.
The change to digital has completely transformed the way journalists work: now it is all computer screens and servers. The process of digitising production, scheduling and broadcasting tools, as undertaken at France Info, simplifies the processes of document exchange and sharing of sound sources by users and centralises archiving. Management of the sound capital in the radio's database is optimised by improved accessibility and sharing in complete security.
Digitisation of the entire radio station opens up new vistas for its development. Not only does a global system optimise production, it also allows France Info to enhance its range of related services such as access to its reports and programmes on the Web site.