The French Federation of Basketball secures its history and sets itself up for future innovation with a swift move to Newsbridge’s Cloud Media Hub and mobile app.
Simon Guionnet manages the archive department at FFBB under long-time Heritage and Archives department head Daniel Champsaur. They sought out a new digital asset management (DAM) system to archive and host the photo, video and PDF files that tracked the whole history of basketball in France.
Over its lifetime, the FFBB had amassed more than 1,300 hours of videos and an archive of more than 120,000 photos. “Our main live archive dates back to 2006, but the historical archive goes all the way back to 1917,” Simon Guionnet explained. These files cover the men’s and women’s pro league and the national teams both on and off-court, as well as footage of fans at games, celebrity fans, trainers and managers.
Champsaur and Guionnet’s main objective was to handle and secure the Federation’s legacy. The archive team wanted to move swiftly — but also make sure they found the right solution to take French basketball into the next phase.
“In the short term, we needed the ability to centralize, archive, and automatically index all photo and video content on a single platform — one that was accessible from anywhere and easily configurable to help us put the most valuable content at the front and center,” Guionnet said.
FFBB also wanted to increase the speed of the workflow, from the delivery of content by photographers and broadcasters, such as France Télévisions or La Chaîne L’Équipe, to that same content being shared with players, partners, and sponsors.
This translated into a need for a cloud media hub and mobile app, for fast and easy access to content by various stakeholders on the go.
The Newsbridge solution
Newsbridge’s solutions for live and archive media asset management were a perfect fit for the FFBB’s immediate needs, while also providing plenty of room for growth and innovation. The Media Hub and Workspace provides that central archive and indexing capability, with customized management of rights and permissions to help make the platform user-friendly and quick to access.
From one central source, the FFBB can now manage and handle its legacy archive, reading back metadata from its previous database and adding it to the new platform. The direct-to-cloud aspect of the media hub enables the fast upload of content — including live uploads from photographers at games — using secure and reliable tools, as well as the ability to instantly share specific shots with team staff and players.
Intelligent collections simplify the process of finding content for each partner category, such as sponsors and the press.
Intelligent collections group specific shots so they can be easily found in the media hub by each partner category.
Each user type can access their own images using those intelligent collections, too. Players from the national teams simply log onto the Newsbridge Mobile App to share footage from their games and other engagements directly with their followers on social media.
The Newsbridge mobile app enables FFBB players and staff to quickly share game highlights to social media channels.
Sponsors such as Nike, Suzuki, EDF and Caisse d’Epargne can access photos of kit with their logo on it. Media and sports magazines can download photos being taken at games happening right now, helping them to report back to the fans.
Sponsor Caisse d’Epargne has direct access to FFBB footage where the banking group’s branding is on show.
All of this was done incredibly quickly: more than 100 years of archived content was moved from FFBB’s legacy system to a custom-built Newsbridge media hub within just four weeks.
FFBB’s Newsbridge Media Hub – how it works
As a result of its move to Newsbridge, FFBB has achieved increased reactivity, enabled automatic media sorting, remote distribution, and also a faster time to publication for its internal teams, sponsors and members of the press.
- Editors can access photos and videos within just a few seconds of the game starting —and it’s now six times faster to find and export the right content.
- Editorial organization is empowered by remote distribution and thematic collections, such as sponsors, team management, and fans.
Thematic collections folders in FFBB’s Newsbridge media hub enhance editorial organization.
“Switching to the Newsbridge platform was a big improvement for us. We had a hard deadline to change platforms before the next season, and Newsbridge provided the assist to keep continuity for our customers, partners and players. The speed at which they worked enabled us to start the 2022/23 basketball season in good hands, ready to maintain the archive and manage all the fresh content coming in.” – Simon Guionnet, Head of Archive, FFBB
“We’re honored to help the FFBB preserve the legacy of basketball in France, to ensure its treasure trove of photos, videos, documents, and more are secure and accessible for decades to come. We’re looking forward to working with FFBB on future archive and workflow innovations powered by our new multimodal and generative AI indexing technology, MXT-1.”– Philippe Petitpont, Co-founder and CEO, Newsbridge.
FFBB x Newsbridge by the numbers
- Media asset recovery of 8TB of video archives and 2.4TB of photos.
- Annual ingest of approximately 600 hours of video and 15,000 photos.
- 30 internal users across multiple departments including marketing and communications teams.
- 300 external users invited to the platform, comprising sponsors, journalists, service providers, and clubs including the French Basketball League (LFB), International Basketball Federation (FIBA), and Spanish Basketball League ACB.
-ENDS-
About FFBB
Founded in 1932, and a member of the International Basketball Federation (FIBA) since 1933, the Fédération Française de BasketBall (FFBB) comprises more than 3,800 clubs and a record 725,009 licensees. It’s the official governing body of basketball in France, and operates the national teams as well as organizing the Coupe de France and women’s championship. It also acts as a publisher, issuing BasketBall Magazine.
Newsbridge is the leading AI company solving the video searchability problem. Powered by MXT-1 multimodal and 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 & efficient media asset management.
Today our platform is used by worldwide TV channels, press agencies, production houses, journalists, editors, archivists, and sports rights holders to boost their production workflow and media ROI.
