ARTE

All the shows, all week long.

ARTE (Association Relative à la Télévision Européenne) has been making television without borders since 1991. The European cultural broadcaster’s program appeals to all European citizens, and especially those viewers in Germany and France.

France and Germany each contribute 40% of the programming, with the central units plus other broadcasting partners all over Europe delivering the remaining 20%.

Setup and automatic maintenance of the online Media Library

In 2007, ARTE took the step of making all its TV broadcasts available for seven days via an online Media Library. This new streaming video service would be known as ARTE +7. The goal was also set of making the running of the ARTE Media Library as automated as possible. To meet this goal, the ARTE team needed to integrate the new service with the existing internal program planning system on a technical and organizational level. All program items would receive a set of broadcast rights, age restrictions and broadcast regions (geolocation), meaning that only that which can be shown, would in fact be shown. In addition, site usage patterns needed to be automatically recorded, analyzed and presented clearly. The project was running to a tight schedule: the new ARTE +7 service was intended to be launched only six months after commencement of the project.

Straight from TV listing to broadcast

ARTE was joined by the implementation partner Sybit in realizing the media library for ARTE +7, using CoreMedia CMS as the foundation. Integrating the video delivery platform from Akamai (who were to deliver the video streams) into CoreMedia CMS would be a simple matter, and the CMS would also reliably and speedily handle the automatic publication of the broadcast items to the online media library. Almost nothing has changed for the editing staff: their work remains much the same, since the system itself manages the timecontrolled online publication of broadcasts almost entirely autonomously. A Flash-based video carousel banner at the top of the page makes navigation simple, and user ratings help other users to select program items. The extensive editorial content on the ARTE website itself is now directly linked to the video of the broadcast program item on ARTE +7. Users of the website can locate programs in a number of different ways: by locating the broadcast date via the comprehensive online program calendar, by searching by name or by genre, by browsing the articles on particular topics of interest, or by using the reminder service “ARTE à la carte”.