The L’Equipe Group is a French sports-based media empire encompassing the L’Équipe TV sports news channel, the www.lequipe.fr website and the RTL-L’Équipe digital radio station. Speakers: Sebastien Valere, L’Equipe 24/24 and Chritine Jecko, vice president Sales, Netia.
The division charged with managing new media at the company is L’Équipe 24/24, and Sebastien Valere, Operations and Marketing Director, stepped up to describe how a new Digital Media Factory (DMF) was created at the company based around the Manreo 2 system from Netia, the digital media asset management subsidiary of the Orange/France Telecom Group company GlobeCast.
Replacing a broadcast system that was ten years old, DMF was conceived as a means of creating and delivering video on every platform including mobile – and crucially to incorporate digital rights management (DRM) right at the creative stage, from Quantel production through Netia archiving and cataloguing to Isilon servers. L’Équipe already has some 11,000 video tapes plus stills dating back to 1920 in its archives, which users previously had to request and subsequently digitise every time they were needed.
Valere said that DMF now puts all assets at the fingertips of users, be they business partners such as CanalSat or the NBA of the US, the L’Équipe newsroom, website, programme production staff or other company group members, via Netia Manreo HyperCast Warehouse for media asset management and the Netia WorkFlow Engine management module.
The system is not only capable of archiving any type of content from the post production system, but also allows all content to be viewed at low resolution from any web‐based interface and interrogated with the Sinequa search engine, he added. Full or partial files can be restored to their original resolution directly to each Quantel editing platform.
When embarking on the automated delivery of content, users can select from libraries covering functions and tasks such as transcoding, FTP, audio extraction, speech to text and quality control, plus modules defining interoperability between HyperCast Warehouse and third party applications such as editing platforms, automation systems and external archives.
But perhaps the icing on L’Équipe’s DRM cake is a deceptively simple ‘traffic light’ system on the user interface, which advises users of the material’s rights status in relation to its prospective use on TV, the web, mobile, VoD, or indeed the ubiquitous ‘other’. – Richard Dean
