
Philippe Petitpont
CEO and Co-Founder
What is your name and position within the organisation?
I’m Philippe Petitpont, the CEO and Co-founder of Newsbridge, the AI and cloud media company I started with my twin brother Frédéric in 2016. We were driven by a desire to redefine the way media teams in sports and the broadcast world manage, store and index audiovisual content.
Before founding Newsbridge, I was a broadcast engineer with French TV channel, TF1. Frédéric was a Technical Lead at BETC (Havas Group) working on digital transformation and big data special projects for top brands. So we saw what it was like on the front lines. It’s becoming less and less acceptable in many organisations to spend hours looking for a specific photo or video clip on tape or through external hard drives. The traditional way of managing, storing and indexing content simply doesn’t fit the time constraints of today’s world.
Can you tell us in less than 100 words what your company does?
Newsbridge is a cloud media hub platform for live and archived content. Our mission is to help organisations immediately access all the content they’ve ever produced.
We promise that you will be able to find the photo or video clip you need in less than 2 seconds. Regardless of whether it’s in a century of football club archives, or 200,000 hours of interviews.
Powered by Multimodal AI Indexing, our platform automatically detects faces, objects, logos, written texts, audio transcripts and the semantic context of content.

Who are your customers?
Our platform is used by worldwide TV channels, press agencies, production houses and sports rights holders.
In sports, we are working with organisations including Bayer 04 Leverkusen, Stade Toulousain, the French Rugby and Football Federations and the Icelandic Football Association. Their common need is to make their content accessible in the cloud, streamline internal workflows and be able to easily search, clip and make game highlights available to key stakeholders – everyone from players to sponsors, partners and the press.

What makes you stand out from your competitors?
Our “secret sauce” is really our Multimodal AI Indexing and semantic search technology. There are many AI-based indexing products on the market, but these “off-the-shelf” solutions are monomodal, meaning they use only one detection element and as a result have multiple points of failure.
Multimodal AI indexing makes media easily searchable, findable, and resellable because it merges detection results from face, text, objects, pattern, and transcription, so you have an incredibly high level of accuracy.
We can, for example, track a player by the name and number on the back of their shirt, a driver by the number on their race car or a motocross rider by the number on their bike – since their faces are hidden behind helmets and goggles.
For our customers, this means a very accurate volume of content returned when they do a search of their media hub, even when they’re looking for needle-in-a-haystack footage, or shots where competitors are really in the thick of the action.

What are the current trends in your business area, and how are they affecting how you work and how you deliver on strategy?
AI-enabled, cloud-based solutions are really propelling the sports and media industries forward.
Implementing a self-service system for sponsors and partners to easily access content via the cloud is now key for many sports organisations. We designed a white label Media Marketplace and mobile app to reflect the needs of editing and content teams – they want to give external partners the autonomy to directly access, clip, request and share media files. This in turn frees up internal teams’ time and resources to focus on higher value tasks.
Another trend that is greatly transforming sports production workflows is the automatic indexing of media upon ingest as much as possible. Currently, many sports organisations still manually tag content during games and events, which is a huge time and efficiency drag. By using AI for automatic tagging and the sorting of photos and videos, teams can focus on the more creative elements of content production instead of being bogged down on the technical side. And, they’re ensuring their audiovisual content will be findable forever.
Finally, many organisations are feeling the pressure to find and establish new forms of revenue. Based on our experience working with our customers, every hour of video archive is worth an estimated potential annual revenue of USD $100. Many organisations are sitting on a content gold mine, if only that content was searchable and therefore reusable! We believe that Multimodal AI Indexing is the key to cracking that mine open.
What challenges have you encountered, and how have they been overcome?
I think one challenge has been to change organisations’ mindsets about their archive. It’s viewed as quite a scary and overwhelming project because, in many cases, the archive has been neglected for far too long. Think decades of photos, PDF files, audio and video footage, stored in multiple places: on old hard drives, even on USB sticks gathering dust in desk drawers.
We’re passionate about helping companies to organise their archive and make it searchable by enriching the files with cognitive metadata, and creating value for them in the process.
Here’s a link to our mission video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6MR21OsLKY
For more information about Newsbridge, our Head of Sport, Yvan Lataste (yvan.lataste@newsbridge.io)
