One of the world’s biggest rugby union leagues is securing and making its 500+ annual matches and 400TB video archive easily accessible to clubs and sponsors, thanks to Newsbridge’s AI-powered cloud solutions.
The French Rugby League, Ligue Nationale de Rugby known as LNR, manages the professional rugby union sector in France. LNR organizes, manages and regulates the TOP 14 PRO D2 and In-extenso Supersevens club divisions. It promotes and develops the professional sector of French rugby clubs, and represents it in the management of European cups. LNR also negotiates and markets the television and partnership rights of its competitions, and upholds the material and moral interests of professional rugby.
Challenge & Context
With its existing media asset manager (MAM) discontinued, LNR found itself in the difficult position of needing to find a new solution in the middle of the busy season. The organization had a video archive with matches from as far back as 1998 stored on cassettes and hard drives, and new recordings and interviews were coming in every week. LNR needed a turnkey platform solution – and fast.
Alongside this most pressing requirement, LNR wanted the ability to quickly and easily share match footage with its 30 first division clubs in the TOP 14 and PRO D2. Partners, sponsors and broadcasters should also have self-service access to highlights.
This translated into a need for a cloud media hub platform, accessible from anywhere, with built-in video tools, Multimodal AI indexing and semantic search capabilities.
The Newsbridge Solution
Following a swift RFP process, LNR chose Newsbridge and its multimodal AI-powered media hub with 400 terabytes of pre-indexed video archive was deployed in just one month. Custom features include:
- Automatic ingest and publishing.
- Logo detection and automated media collections for partners and sponsors.
- Built-in video tools including clipping, automatic transcription and Speech-To-Cut.
- Role-based access for a large number of internal and external media hub users.
LNR’s Newsbridge Media Hub – How it Works
Every weekend all games, highlights and interview footage from LNR’s broadcast partner (French television channel Canal+) is automatically sent to its cloud media hub. Sponsor logos are automatically detected via OCR thanks to Multimodal AI.
Other indexing metadata is applied to the videos through a custom integration with sports data feeds. The indexed match footage is then automatically published to Dailymotion.
The media hub is used by communications and marketing team members from LNR’s 30 clubs, who log in via a simple web browser. A tactical video manager for each team can also access the platform to retrieve widescreen shots, which are used in player reviews and other post-match analysis.
Role-based access allows partners, sponsors and broadcasters to login to LNR’s media hub via the web to access smart folder ‘Collections.’ These are set to specific detection parameters according to the user, and automatically update with all the latest video clips.
With Newsbridge’s semantic search engine and cloud editing tools, users are able to find, clip, transcode and export the footage they need in no time.
François Cotiche, Head of Media Rights & Content at LNR said: “Newsbridge really elevates our video management. From the self-service experience that we can give our clubs and global rugby ecosystem, to the way we can quickly identify and clip match highlights, the cloud media hub allows us to innovate like never before.”
“The platform is easy to use and we receive excellent technical support. If there’s ever a problem, the Newsbridge team responds in a flash.”
Newsbridge co-founder and CTO Frederic Petitpont commented:
“Our work with LNR is a great example of the speed at which our solutions can be deployed for sports clubs and leagues, and how our platform integrates with existing ecosystems. We’re proud to be helping LNR to both preserve and monetize its rich video heritage with our cloud media hub, multimodal AI-powered search and built-in clipping tools for content repurposing, including for video NFTs.”
LNR x Newsbridge by The Numbers
- More than 300 users, comprising LNR staff, its 30 clubs, partners, broadcasters and rugby referees.
- 18,000 hours of video ingested to the Newsbridge Media Hub – and counting.
- Automatic detection of 15 sponsor logos.
About Newsbridge
Newsbridge is the leading AI company solving the video searchability problem. Powered by MXT-1 generative AI indexing technology, Newsbridge provides unprecedented access to audiovisual content by generating natural language descriptions of scenes including the automatic detection of faces, objects, logos, landmarks, written texts, audio transcripts, and semantic context.
Whether it be for managing and accessing live recordings, clipping highlights, future friendly archiving, content retrieval or content showcasing and monetization — Newsbridge solutions enable smart and efficient media asset management.
Today our platform is used worldwide by TV channels, press agencies, production houses, journalists, editors, archivists, and sports rights holders to boost their production workflow and media ROI.
