As France’s newest national general interest channel on DTT channel 19, NOVO19 is owned by Sipa Ouest France. Based in Rennes, the service is built around news and daily life programming for a national audience.
A core feature of the channel’s delivery model is the use of remote technical operations. Capta Prod manages technical production and playout for NOVO19 from its Capta Center hub in Nantes, operating the control room and gallery workflow for daily news and supporting other live programmes such as the JT, On a de l’info.
Capta Center is set up as a multichannel broadcast operation with resilience engineered into the service layer. Capta Prod operates across facilities in the Paris region and Nantes, with mirrored capability in place to support continuity and failover. The two sites approach also supports a wider workload of more than 10 linear TV channels and more than 1,000 live events each year.
“We designed the whole workflow from the start as a multichannel broadcast operation,” said Jordi Bouyssou, technical manager at Capta Prod. “The initial brief was to construct a modular infrastructure capable of handling several channels while providing enough flexibility to support ongoing growth.”
To support operational reliability, Capta Center standardised early on Blackmagic Design across the two facilities’ core production layer, helping avoid a mixed vendor stack across multiple services.
“Blackmagic’s ecosystem is affordable enough that we can run fully mirrored A/B chains, keep spares on the shelf and still cover a broad range of needs without budget overruns,” Bouyssou said. “Working inside one ecosystem has helped simplify integration, monitoring and maintenance.”
Built for scale
The routing design matches multichannel operational realities, incorporating duplicated paths, multiple external feeds, and daily operational requirements. Capta Center’s architecture centres on a Videohub 80×80 12G router for signal management and distribution. The Nantes facility runs a Videohub 120×120 12G, alongside a separate 40×40 router for monitoring and multiview distribution.
“With A/B chains per service and redundant contribution, the crosspoints disappear quickly,” Bouyssou said. “Anything below an 80×80 routing core would have boxed us in almost immediately.”
Monitoring is configured for operations teams and external stakeholders, both onsite and remote. Each channel’s monitoring is built around cascaded Multiview 4 units, with signals routed through the 40×40 monitoring router, allowing layouts to be reconfigured quickly as requirements change.
Select multiview outputs are streamed for offsite viewing using a Web Presenter, enabling remote client checks while operations staff retain a consistent, centralised view of what is in the chain.
For vision mixing, Capta Center uses an ATEM 1 M/E Constellation HD switcher alongside playout servers. Automated channels with minimal live requirements operate in playout only mode, with automation handling transitions, graphics and bumpers. For live programming such as sports, operators switch multiple sources, run downstream keys and handle manual transitions on the ATEM.
“Because everything transits through the routers, we can activate or deactivate the ATEM in a channel’s workflow without any recabling,” Bouyssou said.
In day to day operations, audio mapping is rarely consistent across incoming live feeds, particularly when supporting multiple channels with different delivery specifications. Capta Center normalises those sources by remapping embedded audio as it comes in, allowing operators to align channels quickly without reworking the rest of the chain.
Capta Center standardises server I/O across playout chains and maintains embedded audio under constant confidence monitoring, enabling operators to quickly verify channel presence and routing during live periods. UltraStudio 4K Mini capture cards provide the server interfaces, while Audio Monitor 12G G3 units support confidence monitoring.
Remote production on national scale
When Capta Prod onboarded NOVO19, the national DTT channel expanded Capta Center’s responsibilities to include traffic management and daily remote production of the channel’s news programme. The news studio sits at Ouest France’s Rennes headquarters, connected to Capta Center with dedicated fibre. Two circuits from different operators handle the link, with automatic failover if the primary drops. “The switch happens without any visible disruption during live broadcasts,” confirmed Bouyssou.
“Bringing NOVO19 into the same duplicate path model used across our wider operation enabled us to apply our approach on a national scale and validate many of the technical decisions we had taken,” Bouyssou said.
For distribution, the Paris site runs two playout servers with automatic failover between the primary and backup servers. The signal runs over fibre to the PAR5 datacenter in Paris, where it connects to NOVO19’s final playout chain. Network engineering teams from both organisations manage that connection. Nantes transmits to a separate data centre with redundant links to downstream distributors, giving operators another failover option at the distribution layer.
Bouyssou said standardising on one ecosystem across the broadcast centre and OB deployments simplified engineering support and spares management. “In practice, the outcome has been a supportable, repeatable operational model with predictable signal paths across a growing number of channels and live outputs,” he noted.
“We were confident that with a coherent design and proper redundancy, the Blackmagic ecosystem could sit at the heart of a broadcast operation,” Bouyssou concluded. “In practice, it has delivered, and become an operational advantage as we’ve grown.”
