ISSY-LES-MOULINEAUX, France—France 24, the international news and current affairs television network broadcasting in French, English, Arabic and Spanish, has deployed QuickLink’s StudioEdge and StudioCall to improve its remote guest-integration capabilities.
By integrating QuickLink’s remote guest solutions into its production workflow, the news network improved connection reliability, guest onboarding simplicity and enhanced contribution quality, the company said.
As a broadcaster producing content in four languages, France 24 relies heavily on remote contributions for live news and interviews. Faced with mounting challenges and persistent connection issues when using traditional video conferencing tools, the France 24 team sought a more robust solution.
With the official retirement of Skype and the phase-out of Skype TX, France 24 turned to QuickLink to modernize its infrastructure and streamline its production guest workflow, it said.
QuickLink’s StudioEdge enables France 24 to introduce remote guests via Zoom, Microsoft Teams and QuickLink’s own StudioCall platform. With StudioEdge, the video and audio quality of remote guests and callers can be optimized using AI-technology powered by NVIDIA, ensuring broadcast-quality results with minimal operator intervention, it said.
“StudioEdge resolved a lot of the issues we often encountered using Skype TX,” Eric Devoisin-Lagarde, traffic and external production resources manager at France 24, said. “Today, while we initially planned to integrate StudioEdge gradually, the majority of our connections are already being made through the platform, as it is really simple to learn and deploy. Relying so heavily on QuickLink for our remote contributions helped ease any potential workflow issues with Skype TX being recently discontinued.”
France 24 initially deployed a single StudioEdge server into its production infrastructure to support three channels produced in Paris. It has added two additional since the initial installation to dedicated a server to each language-specific channel, it said.
“Having dedicated servers for each language allows for increased flexibility and reduces any potential bottlenecks during simultaneous live broadcasts,” Devoisin-Lagarde said. France 24 Colombia will also integrate the StudioEdge solution, further expanding the deployment across the network.
The transition to StudioEdge has been smooth for both staff and guests, many of whom were previously familiar with Skype TX. “People don’t feel lost when using StudioEdge, especially those that have used Skype TX in the past,” Devoisin-Lagarde said. “They can very easily learn and use StudioEdge, as there is not a big learning curve from one to the other.”
In addition to StudioEdge, France 24 has also benefited from QuickLink StudioCall, one of the available supported platforms within StudioEdge. It enables operators to connect remote guests simply using a web browser. Invitations can be deployed effortlessly via email, SMS, WhatsApp or by sharing a direct join link, which allows contributors to connect within seconds. StudioCall provides a high level of operator control.
“StudioCall has been a great solution for those who don’t want to use Teams or Zoom; it’s easy to use and the quality is the best,” said Devoisin-Lagarde.
More information is available on the company’s website.
