L'Equipe Teams Up With Quantel And Its Partners

L’Equipe teams up with Quantel and its partnersFrance’s leading sports media group delivers for broadcast, online and mobile with Enterprise sQ

case study 10L’Equipe

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case study 10 L’Equipe


In mid 2009, L’Equipe TV, France’s leading sports news channel,picked Quantel and its partners to design and set up an integratedproduction and delivery system for broadcast, online and mobilecontent. The facility has been up and running since October, enablingL’Equipe 24/24 and L’Equipe Production to provide digital content tocable and satellite channels, the internet, digital radio channels andtelecom operators. At the heart of the new operation is a QuantelEnterprise sQ production system.



In France, L’Equipe stands for quality sports news.Owned by the Amaury family group, a press dynastythat launched the paper just after WWII, the legendarydaily is by far France’s most loved title (especiallyamong men). Over the years, L’Equipe has constantlyadapted itself and extended its offer to all media, toremain the uncontested champion in its category. Thus,in 1998, Amaury launched L’Equipe TV, which hasbecome the top-ranked sports information channel inFrance, with an average 4 million viewers every week.

Leveraging its dominant position in print and television,L’Equipe has for the last three years focused itsdevelopment on the Web and mobile media, including3G telephones and digital radio. Through its variousdelivery channels, L’Equipe reaches 18 million peopleevery month. To increase synergy between thesevarious media, L’Equipe 24/24 (which oversees thebrand’s digital activities) launched a project at thebeginning of 2009 to upgrade its production anddelivery platform. To coordinate the project, XavierSpender, CEO of L’Equipe 24/24, appointed SébastienValère as Operations and Marketing Director.

“Our project wasn’t simply to upgrade our technicalfacilities,” says Sébastien Valère. “Our main goal, in fact,was to implement a business model for rolling out aglobal brand on five different media. We weren’t justlooking for some great machines that would make ourtechnicians happy. What we wanted was to deploy a totalmultimedia and multiplatform newsroom. Our mainrequirement was that our suppliers work together toprovide us with an integrated workflow solution to delivercontent 24/7 on all our media. The global solution builtwith Quantel kit is right on the money for us.”

The Dream Team for L’EquipeSébastien Valère’s first decision was to call in STPConsultants, a firm based in Brussels which specializesin the design and integration of new generationproduction and delivery systems. “Our philosophy,”explains Marc Schulman of STP, “is to enable theconvergence between broadcast and IT-based systems,which implies that beyond technical considerations weensure that all contributors to a project work togetherto achieve a seamless workflow between hardware andsoftware and between video signals and dataprocessing. To achieve that, we advise the broadcasterin choosing the right technology and the right vendorsand we demand that all parties involved in the projectsign a contract of co-responsibility, which binds themlegally, but which above all establishes the basis for atrue collaborative effort between key suppliers.”

L’Equipe chose NETIA for archiving and MAM, and MBTfor on-air automation as partners to set up the workflowand integrate the Quantel sQ-based environment.

Cover picture: Antoine Grossin

This page: Xavier Spender,CEO of L’Equipe 24/24 andnewly appointed Operationsand Marketing DirectorSébastien Valère



Ensuring the link between the past and the future“The ultimate challenge we had,” says Jean-Luc Wolff,Regional Manager of Quantel France, “was to managethe link between the past and the future with teams thathave been working in a mixed environment (tape andnon-linear editing) for 10 years. Our mission with ourpartners was therefore to steer the transition from atraditional broadcast system to a mixed media workflowand to achieve this without complicating people’s lives,whether they happened to be journalists, editors, archivemanagers or technicians.”

“It’s true,” adds Fabrice Bouchet, L’Equipe TV broadcastmanager, “that our project was a bit mad since weundertook to change our technology, our program gridand our station ID all at the same time. Technologically,the Quantel and NETIA solutions really gave us anunprecedented amount of freedom and our 20 in-housejournalists and their many freelance counterpartsquickly appreciated the advantages of the new setup.They find the Quantel editing interface to be practicaland they really appreciate being able to get to thearchival material fast and to know straight off if theyhave the rights for the use they have in mind.”

“Personally, I find that it’s in the archive and MAMsystems that the Quantel/NETIA setup really providesus with added value,” asserts Christophe Berthier,Archive Manager of L’Equipe. “Previously, we had anarchiving system based on a Sine Qua search enginewhich managed our 11,000 tapes and 100,000document references. While this system was fine in abroadcast environment, it wasn’t at all designed to dealwith a mixed media world, where you have a multitudeof rights to manage for each clip on each deliveryplatform. Today, right from the acquisition phase, certainmetadata are automated and others can beconveniently keyed in. The journalist knows immediatelyif the rights for the medium or media he’s working forare available, according to a simple color code (red,yellow, green). It’s a true revolution in our workflowwhich frees up the journalists and which increases ourresponsiveness in going to air or online.”

1. The Quantel sQ at the veryheart of L’Equipe

2. Editing on the sQ Edit ispractical and time efficient

3. L’Equipe’s online archiveworkflow is now streamlinedthanks to the Quantel/NETIAsetup

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The systemThe Enterprise sQ system at L’Equipe isconfigured around an sQ server environment,with over 800 hours of broadcast qualitystorage and Quantel Mission Media AssetManagement. Journalists, craft editors,directors, archive managers and techniciansshare the browsing and editing applicationsprovided by Quantel: sQ View, sQ Cut and sQEdit on the desktops and sQ Edit Plus for craftediting. sQ Record and sQ Play applicationshandle ingest and playout. The Missionsystem includes the Mission Transfer ingestand export application and Mission Trackergiving instant search and access to all media.The whole Quantel system is totally integratedwith the NETIA archiving system and MBTautomation for broadcasting.

A pragmatic approachTo test the setup, the partners installed anearly full scale prototype on site at NETIA inMontpellier in Southern France. “Our mainrequirement,” states Patrick Vauthier,Technical Director of L’Equipe 24/24, “was tocomplete the project fast (less than fourmonths) and to have an operational workflowusing standard tools. Integration wastherefore the key factor and all partnersassumed their responsibilities from the start.”

“Everyone knew that integration was thecritical challenge for the project,” adds MarcSchulman of STP, “but in fact things turnedout to be less complicated than we expectedand everyone’s openness and empathyallowed us to find shared solutions. Forexample, we had to resolve semantic issuesbetween Quantel and NETIA for handling filetransfer protocols, but these were dealt withpragmatically and in good faith, which meantthat we were able to complete the project ontime and on budget, without having to dip intoour reserves.”

L’Equipe 24/24 was also looking to modernizeits station ID and ensure that its visual styleguidelines were properly applied for all showsand by all the people involved in producingcontent, including freelancers. FabriceBouchet indicates that “Quantel integrates awide variety of graphic design andcompositing tools in its solution, to be usedby craft editors and graphics designers, butalso which can be conveniently applied bynon specialists. The templating features of theQuantel system provide us with a wide andtightly controlled series of options that in-house journalists and freelancers can easilyuse and they have been designed to work fastso that even the most sophisticated templatescan be used near to air. Quantel was veryhelpful in this process and introduced us to

Everyone knew thatintegration was thecritical challenge for the project.

Marc Schulman of STP

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A view of the L’Equipenewsroom where variousQuantel browsing andediting applications bring anew dimension to the dailyworkflow of Journalists,craft editors, archivemanagers and technicians

Antoine Grossin, a graphics designer andartistic director who really knows how to getthe very best out of Quantel graphic andtemplating systems and he worked veryclosely with us to create this really compellingvisual style. The result is there on the screenand our viewers have told us how much theyappreciate our new look and feel.”

Winning at home and awayAs part of the overall project, the team atL’Equipe also wanted to integrate thebusiness and services managed by L’EquipeProduction, a subsidiary of the newspaperlaunched in 2006 which produces anddistributes programs and news packages tobroadcasters, Internet content providers andmobile telephone operators. L’EquipeProduction has over the years worked withoutside clients such as SFR (France’s leadingmobile telecom), Orange, MSN, Air Franceand Adidas and it also produces seasonalcontent for ASO (Amaury Sport Organization),a subsidiary of L’Equipe Group whichorganizes high-profile events such as the Tourde France, the Dakar automobile rally and theTour of California.


quantel.com

At a glance

• L’Equipe TV, France’s leading Sportsbroadcaster, needed to create atotally integrated, next-generationproduction system to servebroadcast, internet and mobileplatforms

• Quantel’s Enterprise sQ server-based production technology andMission MAM was chosen to providethe heart of the system

• Quantel worked closely withpartners NETIA, MBT and STPConsultants to realize a fullyintegrated environment

• “The global solution built withQuantel kit is right on the money forus” – Sébastien Valère, L’Equipe TV

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L’Equipe Production provides a wide range of content to its different in-house and outside clients, from soccergoal flashes (for the French, Italian and SpanishLeagues) in near real time on mobile telephones to 30minute daily highlights of the Tour de France withcommentary in eight languages for foreign broadcasters.

“Our main requirement,” says Christophe Robin,Executive Producer of L’Equipe Production, “was toeasily process contents in post-production and toencode them in different formats for delivery todifferent platforms. Between our foreign televisionclients, the internet and mobile devices, we have to goout in a multitude of formats, from MPEG 1, 2 or 4 toFlash, via .wmv (Windows Media) and 3GP, all of whichis now straightforward.”

Jean-Luc Wolff, Regional Manager of Quantel Franceconcludes: “The entire Quantel team, in France andEngland, successfully created a next generationworkflow for totally integrated multi-platform productionand delivery. We participated in a truly collaborativeadventure with our partners and clients. To ensuresmooth transition from the previous system, we calledupon Pascal Ouvrard, our local Quantel trainer whoworked hard to provide the best training and on-airsupport to end users. We’re really thrilled to see thatthe system is getting the job done, enabling L’Equipe toproduce its programs efficiently and to deliver contentseamlessly to all media.”

Above: Graphic design andartistic direction: AntoineGrossin

L'Equipe Teams Up With Quantel And Its Partners

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