Based in Paris, NRJ's production and broadcasting center represents a new strategic tool for the group that will enable them to increase their production of original content. It will initially be used for the channel NRJ Paris and will later include NRJ 12 and NRJ Hits.

 

Active Circle's archiving system is at the core of the channel's digital workflow, storing content produced and ready to broadcast in all the formats required for multi-channel distribution. The system implemented consists of two redundant servers, each with 4 TB of cache to enable parallel processing and accelerate transfer rates, and of 160 TB of storage space in an LTO tape library.

 

The Active Circle system is integrated with the applications used by NRJ Group: ProConsultant's LOUISE for the broadcast management solution and Ninsight's SPARK for the multichannel playout system communicate with Active Circle via its API to obtain a list of archived content and its location. They can then initiate an FTP transfer of the content between Active Circle and the various servers.

 

According to Cédric Drapeau, technical director for NRJ Group's TV division: “The new archiving system enables us to centralize and rationalize content storage for all our playout channels. It provides us with rapid access and highly secure storage on a stable medium – LTO tape – in standard TAR format, thereby guaranteeing that we can access the content on any system.”

 

Already operational for NRJ Paris, this strategic system will be extended to the Group's remaining TV channels in January 2010.