Groupe Média TFO, first french-language Canadian broadcaster to be nominated at IBC 2014 Innovation Awards

TORONTO, June 4, 2014 /CNW/ - The IBC 2014 Innovation Awards, a prestigious international event rewarding technological innovation in the media industry, have just announced that Groupe Média TFO will be one of this year's finalists in the "Content Management" category. Lauded for its technological innovation and creativity, Groupe Média TFO is a trailblazer in the production and broadcast of cross-platform content.

"It is a great honour for TFO to be up for an IBC 2014 Innovation Award with major industry players like BBC iPlayer, Sky Deutschland and Channel 4. This recognition allows us not only to globally position ourselves as an innovative media outlet within the industry, but also to prove that despite limited financial means, innovation knows no boundaries. Indeed, we have met the challenge of being able to improve our production capacity by creating processes that make it easier to instantly convert the format of our television content for a webcast, on-demand video, or social media broadcast, shrinking our average production time from three days to a few hours," stated Glenn O'Farrell, President & CEO of Groupe Média TFO.

As an integral part of its innovative approach, TFO has strengthened its technological performance by adding IPV's Curator system, which allows real-time transcoding of content, instantaneous searching, and integration with Adobe Premiere. The introduction of this new system has made possible the implementation of new workflows based on fluidity and instantaneousness in the broadcast of multimedia content. Now, producers and journalists can edit their content and post it right away, from their workstations, on one of the 200 websites managed by TFO or one of its 10 YouTube channels.

"At the very beginning of the project, we identified our production needs; it was then a question of finding the system best suited to the new architecture we had implemented between April and September 2013. With public funding and limited by budget constraints, we felt it was imperative for us to renew our technology infrastructure in a way that would be cost-effective over the next four or five years. Over a comparable timeframe and with the same number of employees, we were able to improve our in-house production capacity by 40%, while decreasing our use of contract employees by 50%," added Éric Minoli, Chief Technology Officer of Groupe Média TFO.

After completing an organizational and technological restructuring, as well as going through a digital repositioning, TFO recently announced record results for all of its distribution platforms:

TV Audience	● 140% March 2013 vs March 2014
Web	● 101% March 2013: 800,361 page views / month March 2014: 1,614,162 page views / month
YouTube/MINI TFO	● 1205% October 2012: 845,178 views April 2014: 11,000,027 views 6.5 M views in January 2014 vs 1,132,558 in January 2013 More than 12 million views in May 2014
Web: TFO Éducation	95% satisfaction Source: annual survey of more than 1,000 teachers and other education professionals, conducted in March and April 2013

About Groupe Média TFO
Groupe Média TFO is a premium destination for children and audiences seeking educational and innovative content in French. It provides stimulating experiences and award-winning content on the cutting-edge of digital learning. The TFO channel, Mini TFO, and edululu.org, the first online evaluation and ranking service for educational apps in French and English, are some of the offerings of Groupe Média TFO.

SOURCE: Groupe Média TFO

Carole Nkoa
Corporate Communications Specialist
Groupe Média TFO
[email protected]
416 968-8313