Capta Center Supports NOVO19 Remote Production with Blackmagic Design
The facility provides production and playout for national DTT channel with built in redundancy.
Blackmagic Design today announced that Capta Center, a broadcast facility operated by Capta Prod in Nantes, France, has deployed a multichannel control and delivery workflow based on Blackmagic Design to support NOVO19, a new national general interest channel.
NOVO19 launched on DTT channel 19 and is owned by Sipa Ouest France. Based in Rennes, the service broadcasts news and daily life programming for a national audience. Capta Prod manages technical production and playout from its Nantes hub, which runs the control room workflow for daily news and supporting live studio programming.
The Nantes operation is designed as a resilient multichannel broadcast environment with redundancy engineered into the service layer. Capta Prod operates across facilities in the Paris region and Nantes, with mirrored capability supporting continuity and failover. The approach supports more than ten 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 flexibility to support ongoing growth.”
To support operational efficiency, the facility standardized on Blackmagic Design across the sites’ core production layer. “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,” said Bouyssou.
That approach also shaped the routing design, with duplicated paths and multiple external feeds. The architecture centered on a Blackmagic Videohub 80×80 12G router for signal management while the Nantes facility runs a Blackmagic Videohub 120×120 12G router, alongside a separate Blackmagic Videohub 40×40 router for monitoring and multiview distribution.
In daily operation, operators use the ATEM 1 M/E Constellation HD live production switcher alongside playout servers. Automated channels operate in playout only mode, while for live programming, operators switch multiple sources and handle manual transitions on the ATEM 1 M/E Constellation HD. Monitoring is built around linked Blackmagic Multiview 4 HD units, with select outputs streamed for offsite viewing using a Blackmagic Web Presenter 4K streaming solution to enable remote client checks.
With the launch of NOVO19, responsibilities expanded to include traffic management and daily remote production. The news studio sits at Ouest France’s Rennes headquarters, connected to Nantes via dedicated fiber. The link uses two separate lines from different providers, so if one fails the system switches over automatically.
“Bringing NOVO19 into the same duplicate path model used across our wider operation has allowed us to apply our approach on a national scale,” said Bouyssou.
For distribution, the Paris site runs two playout servers with automatic failover. The signal runs over fiber to the PAR5 datacenter in Paris, where it connects to NOVO19’s final playout chain. Nantes transmits to a separate datacenter with redundant links.
“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.”
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