France Forum 2025: Inside the French Tennis Federation and Whisper’s production of Roland-Garros
The Roland-Garros tennis tournament started a new cycle this year, with Whisper chosen by the French Tennis Federation (FFT) as the new host producer until 2029. The FFT was looking to respond to broadcasters’ changing needs, beginning with enhancing the viewer experience and providing better data, panellists explained in a discussion at the SVG Europe France Forum in October.
The FFT took over the event’s coverage back in-house in 2021. “The former four-year cycle allowed us to lay the groundwork and foundations for the future,” said Amandine Tyl, head of production and broadcast services.
“We had the will to question everything we were doing and ask ourselves how to better serve our broadcasters. My job, really, is to be dedicated to the broadcasters and supply them with the content they need, in relation to their audience and changing consumption habits,” she added. “We are now starting a new production cycle with Whisper as host producer.”
The new content strategy includes targeting young audiences more efficiently with dedicated content.
“Tennis is a sport with an audience that tends to be aging, so one of our goals is to rejuvenate this viewership,” said Tyl.
She explained that this means offering them content that better suits their consumption patterns, and in formats that are suitable for that demographic – i.e., more digital and less broadcast-centric.
Whisper was chosen as part of the tender process because of its know-how in storytelling, she noted: “This is a major point for us,” she commented.
For Whisper, it was the first event of this scale. “We went into it with a lot of humility, making sure to surround ourselves with the best teams and service providers,” commented Sebastian Tiffert, account director at Whisper. “And I think we succeeded.”
Digital content included more behind-the-scenes access, more immersive features, and quizzes. “We leaned heavily on our in-house teams,” said Tyl.
“The French Tennis Federation, for instance, has a Community Manager who criss-crosses the Roland-Garros grounds throughout the tournament to capture content. I think we collected 4,000 or 5,000 digital assets.” This content is then reformatted in a specific way to provide this material to the broadcasters, who exploit it on their own networks and digital platforms.
There was also more content produced to act as a runway to the matches, in order to build audiences.
“We did some new-style video hype, with close-ups of the players—small elements, with a daily closer, and 20 or 30-second clips leading up to major matches. We have been looking to super-serve broadcasters,” Tiffert illustrated.
Another major focus was processing more data, thanks to a partnership with TennisViz.
“It was the first time that we captured data for all 16 courts,” said Tyl. “But then, it’s one thing to get the data, and it’s another to make that data meaningful. We have very different kinds of audience profiles, between those of mainstream channels such as France Télévisions, and those of the sports channels of Warner Bros. Discovery or the Tennis Channel, which broadcasts tennis all year round. So we need to popularize data, for instance by grading the players’ shots one to ten.”
The second step is to implement the data graphically, such as creating player cards to enhance game understanding, all in interaction with commentators so they can explain the data on screen. “We will continue to fine-tune this over the years,” Tiffert said.
Asked about the learnings of this first year of collaboration, “The use of French and English!” Tyl responded.
“Historically, everything was in English, but since we have two major French broadcasters, we thought, why not produce some of the content also in French? On paper, it looked really simple. Except, in reality, it’s not. It is not just straightforward translation, it’s more complicated than that…producing in two languages isn’t producing once and putting it in two languages; it’s practically producing twice. We learned together.”
France Forum 2025: Picture gallery of the Paris event
