BTV Drives Media Business Transformation with Cloud Convergence

Data Brief

Focusing on 3 levels

Cloud-enabled core production and broadcast business reaching 30%

Client's Testimony

The Internet thinking features users first and business oriented services. Technical systems need to meet the requirements for supporting business development. The informatization of the Media industry requires not only the transformation of technology, but also the transformation of positioning of the entire system, which thus requires vendors, by taking into consideration of the characteristics of enterprises and application scenarios, to provide complete and comprehensive solutions with development adaptability.

Bi Jiang

Deputy Chief Engineer, BTV

Relevant Products: Cloud computing, Servers

Relevant Solutions: Cloud computing, Media

Diversified media channels are promoting the rebuilding and transformation of media content production and management models. BTV has cooperated with H3C to build a flexible and efficient converged media cloud platform, which lays a solid foundation for business transformation through centralized sharing of content and technical systems with H3C's powerful underlying virtual computing equipment.

The rapid development of information technology exposes users to the emerging media with network videos, mobile videos and social platforms as the core, traditional media is therefore faced with fierce market competition. In order to cope with this challenge, traditional media need to fully integrate with new media and gradually develop towards resource concentration, mutual superposition and three-dimensional communication channels, thus stepping into the era of integrated media. In this context, the emergence of the converged media production cloud platform provides a new way for large media organizations to achieve unified content acquisition, production, storage and distribution, and even management remodeling and industrial convergence.

In BTV, the converged media production cloud platform is becoming a core tool that drives the convergence of traditional and emerging media. As one of the earliest provincial-level television stations that introduce cloud computing into media production, BTV has joined hands with H3C Group (H3C) to carry out the construction of the converged media production could, accelerating media convergence through comprehensive upgrading of technical systems.

Taking convergence as the path to accelerate the construction of media cloud in BTV through media transformation

As the most distinctive Internet gala in history, the 2017 "Double 11" Party was broadcast live by BTV, Zhejiang TV and Shenzhen TV, successfully completing the "three channels for one evening party", the largest geographical span in the history of real-time interactive broadcasting. Users could watch shows and interact with friends while shopping through TV, Internet, mobile phone and other platforms. All these cannot be achieved without the accelerated development of media convergence.

In 2017, BTV officially announced the multi-platform converged media strategy with two brands (BTV Life and BTVi Life), which includes the alliance of six platforms. The objectives of the strategy can be summarized as "quality contents, best experience, full convergence, and maximum sharing". It expects, by making fully use of natural advantages, to build a new industrial ecology integrating communication, R&D, marketing, investment and incubation, and to transform content productivity into industrial productivity. In order to build an underlying technical architecture fully adaptive to the development of converged media business, BTV takes the converged media production cloud platform as a new generation of core business technical support platform to achieve multi-source convergence, co-platform production and multi-channel release.

Transcending the boundary, H3C builds cloud-enabled core business platform with all-round strength

As the leader of digital solutions with both technical strength and practical experience, H3C has been deeply involved in BTV's practice in converged media cloud. At present, H3C has become the integrated service provider for the first-phase construction of the entire IaaS (infrastructure as a service) layer of the production system of BTV, and also the provider of solutions for the entire basic resource layer.

In the first phase of BTV's converged media production cloud project, H3C has delivered infrastructure services for BTV, providing the upper-layer media capability platform (PaaS) and application platform (SaaS) with stronger computing, storage, networking capabilities and more flexible resource scheduling methods through 500 high-performance virtual servers, 110 virtual workstations with professional graphics cards, and virtual machine storage. Based on the H3C Cloud computing technology, the IaaS platform of converged media and PaaS and SaaS platforms of the media industry are integrated on the underlying devices, which enables the complete delivery of BTV's converged media could platform. At present, 30% of core production and broadcast business has been cloud-enabled.

The launch of BTV's converged media production cloud platform not only witnesses another leading industrial practice of H3C's efforts in developing converged media cloud platform, but also provides a valuable reference for the transformation and upgrading of the radio and television industry in China. Media convergence brings about both opportunities and challenges to the radio and television industry. H3C will join hands with radio and television clients as always to promote the transformation and development of the industry in the era of converged media.