TV5 Québec Canada Selects Grass Valley for Disaster Recovery Site

TV5 Québec Canada has become the nation’s first broadcaster to implement a disaster recovery site for its playout and transmission operations, using GV STRATUS Playout from Grass Valley, a Belden Brand.

The station ran a wide-scale disaster simulation in August, evacuating its building for several hours to test the recovery site, a rented office space with a limited set of generic computers that had nothing installed. In less than an hour, the site was online. GV STRATUS Playout fit precisely with TV5 Québec Canada’s requirement of parallel transmission paths to its primary playout chains, ensuring continuous playout operations for two channels—TV5 and Unis—that would be needed in a catastrophe.

In addition, because GV STRATUS Playout can be controlled from anywhere using a standard web browser, even while the rest of the remote office was coming online,the revenue-generating components still had access and control within a few minutes of leaving the building.

“Not having a playout would cost us money and credibility,” says Régis Harrison, director of operations and technology development, TV5 Québec Canada. “Now we not only have playout that we can control and manage remotely, we also have access to our directory, videos and all of our enterprise tools.”

Besides GV STRATUS Playout — a cloud-based Software as a Service (SaaS) for broadcast playout combining the simplicity, flexibility and accessibility of the cloud with the rock-solid performance of solid-state playout servers — TV5 Québec Canada bought several other Grass Valley products from Applied Electronics Ltd. as part of a broader solution. Those products include the Densité IRD, K2 Summit TX, and K2 Solo.

“When TV5 Québec Canada faces challenges that are very complex and delicate, this provides a simple, lightweight, cost-effective mirror of its Canadian operations,” says Steve Stubelt, vice president of sales, North America, Grass Valley. “GV STRATUS Playout tools are cloud-enabled, they can operate in a variety of environments and can be tailored for each user’s job, increasing efficiencies and collaboration.”