The Consultancy's Guest bloggers | N°5: Dominique Curchod
When a challenge creates an opportunity, by Dominique Curchod
For 20 years, Dominique Curchod Communication has been helping increase its clients’ visibility in Television and on the Internet through highly sophisticated distribution systems at the relational, editorial and technical levels.
The 2020 lockdown brought new challenges but also new opportunities for us to help our clients harness their heritage and get organized for the future. This strange immobility led to the cancellation of most of the sporting events around the world. Events we had been preparing to distribute and broadcast to an international audience never took place. This halt in production activities also meant a new challenge for TV programmers.
The 2020 lockdown brought new challenges but also new opportunities for us to help our clients harness their heritage and get organized for the future. This strange immobility led to the cancellation of most of the sporting events around the world. Events we had been preparing to distribute and broadcast to an international audience never took place. This halt in production activities also meant a new challenge for TV programmers.
A large part of our productions, especially the highlights, are mostly offered to Television channels free of charge. With the gaping hole left from cancelled events, we had to come up with content to fill the airtime. We, therefore, set out to find as many of the programmes from 2018 and 2019 as possible for the market. We offered them to programmers. This was a great success: at the end of March, we already had almost 200 hours of programming. And now more than 500. With help from our partners, such as Discovery, Eurovision and Asiavision, we were able to offer these programmes to more than 1,000 channels.
For this to be possible, we had to create ad hoc distribution platforms with massive storage. One thing led to another, which raised the need to archive the content from several sporting events and federations. Two multinational companies contacted us for this very reason. Time to think was new in this industry, which tends to work on the future, not the past. Archives are nothing other than the heritage of these organizations. The Covid-19 lockdown gave us the opportunity to address how to help these organizations start archiving their content so that it would be easier to access going forward. Magnetic tapes and cassettes were discovered, stored in cupboards, at best, in cellars, at worst – media that up until that point had been destined to deteriorate over time.
By getting together and taking the necessary time for once, we created the steps for managing digitalization, the first being simply copying the files. Followed by the creation of databases, then the segmentation of contents, and finally the management of said content on digital platforms, which translated into à la carte services with qualitative, affordable providers in Italy, Germany and Asia. Of course, treasures were found, sometimes on VHS, but they are still usable. New restoration technologies will soon make it possible to improve these tapes, but it is first essential to save them quickly to hard disks.
After six months of research, contacts, proposals, steps and meetings, we find ourselves with a new activity to manage – content archiving. As Plato wrote, "Necessity is the mother of invention".
For this to be possible, we had to create ad hoc distribution platforms with massive storage. One thing led to another, which raised the need to archive the content from several sporting events and federations. Two multinational companies contacted us for this very reason. Time to think was new in this industry, which tends to work on the future, not the past. Archives are nothing other than the heritage of these organizations. The Covid-19 lockdown gave us the opportunity to address how to help these organizations start archiving their content so that it would be easier to access going forward. Magnetic tapes and cassettes were discovered, stored in cupboards, at best, in cellars, at worst – media that up until that point had been destined to deteriorate over time.
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| Les Echos |
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Dominique Curchod
Dominique Curchod Communication started operations in 1998. Since then digitalization and along with it the multiplication of channels both in type and number, has given image broadcasting an increasingly wider importance. Internet is merging and will merge even more with television as we know it today. Beyond the simple distribution of traditional hard-copy communications (the printed press accounts only for 20% of the world's information), we know that the next few years will be characterized by an intensification in the broadcasting and use of images as well as their distribution on all types of media (television and internet images cover 80% of the world's information).
Dominique Curchod Communication, with its unrivalled experience with all video media and on every continent, assists its clients in understanding the mechanisms and workings of this particular environment in order to harness it for their communication requirements.
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