LNR utilises Newsbridge to secure media heritage and share match highlights with clubs and sponsors

The French Rugby League, Ligue Nationale de Rugby known as LNR, manages the professional rugby union sector in France. It organises, manages and regulates the Top 14, Pro D2 and Supersevens club divisions, and promotes and develops the professional sector of French rugby clubs. LNR also negotiates and markets the television and partnership rights of its competitions and upholds the material and moral interests of professional rugby.

When its existing media asset manager (MAM) was discontinued, LNR found itself in the difficult position of needing to find a new solution in the middle of a busy season. The organisation had a video archive with matches from as far back as 1998 stored on cassettes and hard drives, and new recordings and interviews were coming in every week. LNR needed a turnkey platform solution – and fast.

Alongside this most pressing requirement, LNR also wanted the ability to quickly and easily share match footage with its 30 first division clubs in the Top 14 and Pro D2. Partners, sponsors and broadcasters should also have self-service access to highlights.

This translated into the need for a cloud media hub platform, accessible from anywhere, with built-in video tools, multimodal AI indexing and semantic search capabilities.

Following a swift RFP process, LNR chose Newsbridge, and its multimodal AI-powered media hub with 400 terabytes of pre-indexed video archive was deployed in just one month. Custom features include automatic ingest and publishing; logo detection and automated media collections for partners and sponsors; built-in video tools including clipping, automatic transcription and speech-to-cut; and role-based access for a large number of internal and external media hub users.

Every weekend all games, highlights and interview footage from Canal+, LNR’s broadcast partner, is automatically sent to its cloud media hub. Sponsor logos are automatically detected via OCR thanks to multimodal AI.

Other indexing metadata is applied to the videos through a custom integration with sports data feeds. The indexed match footage is then automatically published to Dailymotion.

The media hub is used by communications and marketing team members from LNR’s 30 clubs, who log in via a simple web browser. A tactical video manager for each team can also access the platform to retrieve widescreen shots, which are used in player reviews and other post-match analysis.

Role-based access allows partners, sponsors and broadcasters to log in to LNR’s media hub via the web to access smart folder ‘Collections’. These are set to specific detection parameters according to the user, and automatically update with all the latest video clips.

With Newsbridge’s semantic search engine and cloud editing tools, users are able to find, clip, transcode and export the footage they need in no time.

François Cotiche, head of media rights & content at LNR, said: “Newsbridge really elevates our video management. From the self-service experience that we can give our clubs and global rugby ecosystem, to the way we can quickly identify and clip match highlights, the cloud media hub allows us to innovate like never before.

“The platform is easy to use and we receive excellent technical support. If there’s ever a problem, the Newsbridge team responds in a flash.”

Newsbridge co-founder and CTO Frederic Petitpont commented: “Our work with LNR is a great example of the speed at which our solutions can be deployed for sports clubs and leagues, and how our platform integrates with existing ecosystems. We’re proud to be helping LNR to both preserve and monetise its rich video heritage with our cloud media hub, multimodal AI-powered search and built-in clipping tools for content repurposing, including for video NFTs.”