France Télévisions prepared for 2024 Olympic Games with AWS Countdown Premium

The Paris 2024 Olympic Games represented much more than a sporting celebration—they marked a revolution in how global events are broadcast and monetized. France Télévisions, with its heritage of over 60 years of Olympic coverage, partnered with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to tackle this unprecedented technological challenge, leveraging the AWS Countdown program to ensure optimal preparation.

We reveal the behind-the-scenes of France Télévisions’ technological preparation for the Paris 2024 Olympic Games. Discover how AWS Countdown Premium helped the French broadcaster team to meet the major challenge of broadcasting this international event, and how this methodical approach is now redefining the standards of preparation for future global events.

AWS Countdown: Personalized support for critical events

AWS designed AWS Countdown to support customers in preparing for large-scale events. This program provides organizations with personalized support to anticipate technical challenges, optimize their infrastructure, and confirm seamless broadcasting during large-scale events.

The AWS Countdown program provides privileged access to experienced AWS architects who collaborate closely with your technical teams several weeks before a critical event. It aims to provide peace of mind by planning for optimized infrastructure scaling to accommodate traffic spikes and reducing operational risks through in-depth architecture reviews and performance tests simulating real-world event conditions.

The primary objective of AWS Countdown Premium is to provide optimal architecture performance and high availability through resilient designs and detailed contingency plans. Priority technical support with dedicated AWS experts is also available during the event, ready to intervene in case of incidents. This program has already proven itself during major international sporting events, major product launches, and global media broadcasts.

AWS Countdown Premium in five steps

Figure 1: AWS Countdown Program.

Following is a breakdown of the workflow for AWS Countdown Premium:

1. The first step consists of identifying your specific needs and defining critical situations requiring specialized support. The Countdown program covers a wide variety of high-stakes contexts: broadcasting major sporting events (such as the Olympics or the World Cup), strategic product launches, seasonal ecommerce traffic peaks (like Black Friday and Cyber Monday), as well as sensitive technical operations (such as complex architecture migrations, critical maintenance, and high-availability application deployments).
2. The second step consists of connecting with AWS teams between 8-6 weeks before your event. This collaboration begins with scoping meetings designed to define the event context, business objectives, and technical challenges to address.
3. Next, during the preparation phase, AWS teams plan with you a series of customized meetings based on the type of event, technologies to be used, and previously identified risks. These sessions allow for conducting an architecture review according to the pillars of the AWS Well-Architected Framework to identify additional risks that may exist and share best practices upstream. Different AWS specialists will participate in review meetings to reassure you on various architecture aspects. A capacity assessment on the AWS services side and load and performance tests on the client side are conducted to avoid surprises during the event. Finally, observability tools are configured between you and AWS teams to monitor the event and react as quickly as possible in case of issues.
4. On the day of the event, if you wish, AWS resources can be available during all or part of the event to support and monitor it. We share escalation matrices during preparation to communicate and intervene proactively if your teams or AWS teams detect a problem, enabling quick resolution.
5. One or two weeks after the event, we conduct a post-mortem review to analyze the results. This analysis identifies the causes of any issues encountered, if there were any, and proposes improvement points for your future events.

Practical implementation at France Télévisions

In preparation for the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, France Télévisions faced the challenge of ensuring flawless broadcasting of this global event while guaranteeing the security and resilience of its systems. As a customer benefiting from AWS Enterprise Support, France Télévisions leveraged the AWS Countdown program.

The collaboration between AWS and France Télévisions began with weekly meetings serving as a focal point for risk identification and tracking. These sessions also provided an opportunity to address technical questions from France Télévisions’ Video Factory team.

A key element of this preparation was conducting a Well-Architected review, specifically focused on optimizing the platform’s security posture. This was particularly crucial given the inherent security challenges of an event the scale of the Olympic Games.

To verify optimal responsiveness, AWS support teams were briefed on France Télévisions’ platform architecture. In parallel, rigorous tracking of open support cases was implemented, facilitating adequate technical evolution ahead of the event. The platform was tested during major events (such as Roland Garros and the 2024 Tour de France), providing valuable indicators of its performance under real conditions.

A crucial aspect of the preparation was proactive capacity planning for critical services, especially AWS Elemental MediaTailor. This planning was based on audience estimates provided by France Télévisions for the four broadcast channels (France 2, France 3, France 5, and Paris 2024), with particular attention paid to the opening ceremony day, anticipated as the peak audience maximum.

Specific security recommendations

AWS teams formulated specific recommendations to strengthen the infrastructure’s security. These measures included enabling Amazon GuardDuty for continuous threat detection. The teams verified quotas for each media service and analyzed risks at the resource level. Verification of public access to the environment helped mitigate vulnerabilities.

AWS recommended enabling versioning for Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets for AWS CloudTrail logs and AWS Cloud Development Kit asset data. Implementing quarterly rotation of AWS Identity and Access Management security keys was also recommended. The implementation of these measures significantly strengthened the robustness of the broadcasting infrastructure while maintaining transparent and continuous communication between France Télévisions stakeholders and AWS teams.

Operational monitoring and resilience during the event

The opening ceremony on July 26 attracted a considerable audience (24.4 million viewers), highlighting the crucial importance of flawless broadcasting. A support engineer was available continuously throughout the opening ceremony, ready to intervene quickly in case of issues. Thanks to the preparation carried out as part of the AWS Countdown program, AWS specialist teams and France Télévisions had established precise contact procedures and an escalation matrix.

This structured collaboration and continuous monitoring provided smooth and uninterrupted broadcasting throughout the event, demonstrating the effectiveness of the resilience measures put in place.

Results and future perspectives

The Paris 2024 Olympic Games served as a real-world test for France Télévisions’ platform.

The results exceeded expectations:

• Achievement 100% of advertising department objectives
• Record audience and engagement with over 200 million video views
• More than 320 million ad insertions completed

This experience confirmed the crucial importance of redundancy and business continuity plans for large-scale events. Following this major event, in-depth analyses were conducted to further optimize platform performance and prepare for future events. This work notably identified areas for improvement such as strengthening load testing and optimizing AWS service configurations.

Conclusion

The comprehensive and meticulous approach offered by AWS Countdown Premium helped France Télévisions to benefit from exhaustive preparation for this global-scale event. This close collaboration not only optimized the platform’s security and performance but also strengthened France Télévisions’ confidence in its ability to ensure high-quality broadcasting.

The experience gained, lessons learned, and improvements implemented provides France Télévisions a way to approach future events with a more robust, performant, and resilient infrastructure. Continuing the goal to innovate, to deliver an optimal user experience and maximize monetization opportunities, while assuring service continuity, even during exceptional traffic peaks.

If you are planning a major migration or expecting to face a large-scale event soon, reach out to AWS, we remain at your disposal.

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