Interview: François Chabat, senior technology manager, Channel Five

Chabat: We wanted one team to speak to when something went wrong

Home to such TV delights as Neighbours, The Gadget Show and Fifth Gear, Channel Five is cranking up its online output as it strives to gain ground on its more established rivals. Leading the broadcaster’s ambitious digital strategy is senior technology manager François Chabat.

Speaking exclusively to Computing, Chabat admits Channel Five had a lot of lost ground to make up when it decided to overhaul its online operation.

“Five didn’t invest as heavily in digital media as other broadcasters initially,” he says. “Then back in 2007, there was an acknowledgment at board level that this had to change.”

So the channel put together a team to define and carry out its digital strategy. “The Digital Media Group was established to make profitable online propositions and capitalise on the emergence of video on demand,” he says.

Before the formation of the Digital Media Group, Five’s online operation consisted of aa collection of small web sites that addressed separate parts of the channel’s business, including marketing, programming and commissioning, with no interaction or co-ordination between them.

“There was no aggregated view, and not a great deal of technical knowledge among the people who were initiating those projects – it was a bit all over the place, initially,” says Chabat.

“This is what prompted the change. The objective was to have a consistent relationship with one host that would provide us with streamlined operational processes. Basically, we wanted one team to speak to when something went wrong.”

Chabat says that by consolidating its online operations in one place, Five was able to save money on web hosting by striking a deal with just one provider, Claranet.

Reliance on open source When Five’s Digital Media Group was put together, the first action it took was to define a new technology strategy, with consolidated hosting being the top priority. Another early decision was to use open-source software such as Red Hat Linux, Apache and MySQL to keep costs down.

Ruby on Rails and PHP form the development framework that runs on top of those core technologies. Chabat says the broadcaster’s decision to use Ruby on Rails – a relatively new open-source web application framework for the Ruby programming language – has been a real success.

“PHP is proven, but two years ago we decided to use Ruby on Rails as well. It has been great, with use of the platform growing massively and there is a real agile community,” he says. “Developers had been frustrated with a lot of the limitations of web development frameworks such as J2EE and .NET. They had used these for a few years, identified problems and produced a solution.”

Chabat admits that it was a risk to use Ruby on Rails two years ago, when it was still unproven, but says the move has paid off and that Five now enjoys a very fast and much better development life cycle as a result.

“We engage with a much better developer community – it tends to be people who have embraced agile software engineering techniques,” he says.

Chabat says the group wanted to use a virtualised platform from the off, but was concerned that it was already taking on a lot from scratch, and using a dedicated hosting service seemed more sensible at that stage.

“Our ambition was very much to move to a virtualised platform,” says Chabat. “When we started the deal with Claranet, we felt that the products were not mature enough. We went to suppliers and they would say, ‘Virtualisation? Yes, it’s great’. But when we asked them to show it to us, as a product that customers were actually using, nobody had anything tangible. Because we were starting so many things from scratch, we decided this was one risk too many.”

So the group began with dedicated hosting as it was already familiar with how that worked. Now, 18 months later, Claranet is moving Five to a virtualised hosting environment, or private cloud, which should prove more cost-effective given that it will allow resources to be dynamically allocated to reflect the regular peaks and troughs experienced by Five’s web site.