Fastly beats CDN competitors to boost TF1’s multi-CDN strategy

The challenge

The Francophone world covers the globe: In North and South America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Oceania, French is among the official and administrative languages. As the largest television broadcaster and video streaming network in France, TF1 serves viewers in all of those locations. Delivering high-quality video to the hundreds of millions of French speakers worldwide, especially to the more remote island nations and territories, posed a challenge for TF1’s small infrastructure team. The broadcaster needed a video delivery strategy that could reach all of their viewers flawlessly, even during spikes in demand, while remaining cost effective. The infrastructure team also wanted a partner that put flexibility for developers first. A competitive RFP process including TF1’s legacy CDN and potential new CDN vendors led the company to Fastly.

The solution

“We needed a global actor to help us reach all of our viewers efficiently and help us handle peaks,” said Simon Laroque, Project Manager for the video streaming infrastructure team at TF1. The 5-person team manages encoding, transcoding, packaging, and video delivery, including CDN services. “Fastly has helped us solve all of those issues with a solution that is extremely easy to integrate into my infrastructure as code.” TF1’s multi-CDN strategy includes Fastly along with the company’s internal CDN.

Reliable global delivery

The Fastly network of strategically placed, geographically distributed points of presence (POPs) gives TF1 the global infrastructure to satisfy viewers in French Polynesia just as easily as it does viewers in France. The dispersed network also allows TF1 to scale rapidly with traffic surges. “Fastly is a critical part of our CDN mix when we broadcast major events—for example, the 2023 Rugby World Cup, held in cities across France,” said Laroque. Despite challenges like unexpected traffic spikes and the need for swift adjustments, Fastly played a pivotal role in ensuring uninterrupted streaming delivery.

Seamless integration and scalability

Customers frequently cite ease of use as one of their favorite Fastly features. “Fastly has been very easy to integrate into our infrastructure,” said Laroque.“I can easily deploy new setups, endpoints, and properties to adapt to changing requirements.” Fastly's flexibility also enables TF1 to migrate traffic effortlessly among CDNs to deliver content faster on a larger scale while maintaining high performance and reliability.
User-friendly interface and robust infrastructure as code

TF1’s infrastructure engineers benefit from the addition of Fastly as much as TF1 viewers. “We really like the user interface compared to the competition. It’s much simpler to use, it’s clearer, and—most importantly—we can find what we want more easily,” said Laroque. An infrastructure-as-code model offers the benefits of speed, developer empowerment, and scalability, which are critical for a small team. Fastly’s integration with the infrastructure-as-code tool Terraform also helped TF1 streamline operations and develop a more efficient workflow for the entire infrastructure team. “Fastly’s maturity in the infrastructure-as-code space was another advantage over other vendors,” said Laroque.

Key takeaway

Fastly has given TF1 the global reach, scaling capacity, and programmability the broadcaster needed to deliver high-quality video to all viewers and help the infrastructure team work more efficiently. The team’s appreciation for Fastly’s technology in comparison to competitors has also prompted ongoing discussions about additional opportunities to partner with Fastly. “We are exploring the possibility of deploying Fastly's technology directly into our infrastructure,” says Laroque. “This collaboration promises to further enhance our content delivery capabilities, providing an even better experience for our end users.”