Posted Sep 29, 2022, 11:33 AM
Sports media, clubs and rights holders generate millions of hours of video every year. A valuable but expensive heritage to store and whose sorting turns out to be particularly time-consuming.
It is on the strength of this observation that Philippe and Frédéric Petitpont created in December 2015 in Boulogne-Billancourt (Hauts-de-Seine) the start-up Newsbridge which just raised 7 million euros on September 9 from Supernova Invest, Elaia and several business angels.
A detailed analysis of video content
Concretely, the AI designed by this company of 35 employees, and put on the market three years ago, analyzes the content of subscribed customers using deep learning, by identifying faces, words and decorative elements, for example.
“The example that I often give is that of the storming of the Capitol, in the United States, in January 2021. AFP, which is one of our clients, was there and shot hundreds of hours of videos, for the mostly uninteresting. Thanks to our solution, which works like a search engine, they can easily find a specific sequence using keywords, such as “Donald Trump” and “Rudy Giuliani” for example, even if the sequence in question had no not been tagged with these terms,” explains Philippe Petitpont.
Subscribing to the service also gives the right to storage of this data in a cloud, and billing is indexed to the mass of data, which makes it accessible even to small rights holders.
Monetize forgotten content
Recently, Newsbridge has also offered its customers the possibility of reselling their content to third parties, using the same search engine. Thus, these stocks of data which were unusable economic burdens, find their usefulness thanks to sorting and can even become a source of income.
Already present in 5 countries, in Europe and the Middle East, the young shoot claims to be in negotiations with several major accounts and hopes to have indexed a dozen countries by the end of the year. In total, it claims around forty clients, including AFP, TF1, LOSC, FFF, Brut and even Le Parisien, for France.
The fundraising, carried out in series A, should make it possible to develop the European market but above all to open an office in the United States in early 2023, with the NBA market in particular in the lead, which alone represents 50 petabytes of pictures.
