EBS helps Euronews expand services to HOT, OSN, Nova and Sky Italia

EBS has significantly expanded its EPG data services with Euronews, the multi-lingual international news media group based in Lyon-Écully in France. EBS has supplied EPG data on behalf of Euronews to BSkyB and Freesat in the UK for more than ten years and is now expanding that service to include OSN (Middle East and North Africa), HOT (Israel), Nova (Greece) and Sky Italia.

Euronews’ rolling news channel broadcasts across multiple platforms in 156 countries, which all require different EPG data specifications. This includes various file formats, permitted character lengths, additional data fields and flags, and is therefore not a quick and easy task. EBS is able to take all the scheduling information for the channel and restructure it to meet the requirements of each operator in any territory, providing one point of contact throughout the process with a clear, defined workflow.

EBS’ in-house scheduling application, Mediator, provides a simple click-once-send-to-many approach that allows EBS to very easily export EPG data to meet the strict requirements of the operator, ensuring that viewers are fully aware of what Euronews is airing.

Sylvie Paulin, Senior Distribution Manager, Euronews said, “As a multilingual and worldwide news channel, we are facing a large request of different formats to meet the needs of operators around the world.  To perfectly inform viewers about our various news programmes, EBS has the accurate expertise to provide us the solutions to adapt our EPG requirements very easily and to react quickly.”

Matt Smith, Business Development Manager, EBS said “taking a channel’s EPG data to a new territory can be challenging and it’s our job to simplify the process so the operator receives the correct data in the correct format on time. Each platform will have preferred formats, methods of delivery and other idiosyncrasies that can prove difficult for channels to accommodate.

“Not least alongside the rest of the day-to-day business involved in running an international, multi-lingual channel across many operators. EBS offers an outsourced solution that takes this difficulty away, replacing it with a single account manager to deal with any queries,” said Smith.