Founded in 1944 and a stronghold of French football through the 1940s and 1950s, Lille Olympique Sporting Club (LOSC) whose nickname is Les Dogues, is enjoying a renaissance both on and off the field.
The club are the current Champions of the French Ligue 1 (having previously won in 1946, 1954 and 2011), holders of the French Super Cup and enjoying a fantastic run to the 2021-22 UEFA Champions League knockout stages – the club’s eighth appearance in the UEFA Champions League.
Since 2012 LOSC Lille have played at the Stade Pierre-Mauroy, just outside Lille, with a seating capacity of over 50,000. Guided by President Olivier Létang, the performance of the football club, and the ambition of its supporters, is matched by a grand vision for excellence in all aspects ranging from its on field activities to a new focus on marketing and communication strategies.
A key to this activity is a plan to generate more revenue and to grow the club’s fanbase at home and internationally with smart use of its extensive media archive and live content from the ongoing season.
The club has a rich history of media assets including rushes of its most iconic matches, clips, audio commentary, photographs and press conferences dating back over decades but it needed a way to unlock its value. Not only was the media stored in different locations on the club’s facilities and legacy on prem systems, but also in different video formats.
The club’s media team needed a more collaborative approach to managing and repurposing this gold dust and, specifically, one which would integrate seamlessly with the club’s Adobe Suite of creative packages. Collaborating via the cloud would enable greater flexibility for people to work wherever they were located in addition to reducing the cost of maintaining dedicated servers on site.
At the end of 2020, LOSC launched a Request For Proposal and following a rigorous internal assessment, selected the AI-powered Media Hub from Moments Lab (ex Newsbridge). The club was confident that it would be the robust and scalable platform on which to base future media asset valorisation strategy.
Since the set up from summer 2021, Moments Lab Media Hub has enabled LOSC’s media team to centralize, work on and share hundreds of hours of new and legacy content via a shared cloud workspace.
Behind the scenes and in preparation, Moments Lab imported video archives and managed its migration. Moments Lab’s team configured a custom storage strategy for LOSC in order to maximize cost efficiencies: flash storage for the current football season; cold storage for all pro-team games dating back three years, and a further tier of deep storage for all club archives including broadcast-ready clips and games from the last decade. To protect the assets against misuse and piracy, all the club’s media assets are automatically watermarked on ingest into the Moments Lab platform.
The platform’s main internal users are the LOSC’s media management, marketing and sponsorship teams. Meanwhile, publishing to the club’s own website and social media channels including Dailymotion and YouTube is enabled directly from Moments Lab.
At the same time, the online collection is ever growing as audiovisual content is indexed by Newbridge’s Multimodal AI. This intelligent and automated technology employs sophisticated speech-to-text, face and object detection engines to build user-searchable metadata for rapid and intuitive discovery of assets. A custom thesaurus of players and the club’s key stakeholders was built to allow the AI to recognize the club’s VIPs. Multimodal AI cross-analyzes multiple data sources to detect accurately and quickly what’s inside the club’s rushes. Moments Lab’s signature semantic search engine allows users to find exact moments, quotes, individuals and context just by using the search bar.
The infused metadata stamping generated by AI added an additional layer of efficiency in the form of SEO enrichment. When the team’s content is sent to The Dogues’ Dailymotion and YouTube accounts, it is automatically pre-tagged with relevant keywords to make it efficiently searchable.
Thanks to the success of this project, the Dogues now plan to embark on a media asset monetization program which, among other initiatives, will include the ability for broadcasters, brands and other third-party service providers to license and access unique clips from its archive.
Thomas Cusseau, Head of Club Media, explains:
“As the LOSC develops, the archiving and distribution of our video and photo heritage becomes a strategic marketing and commercial challenge.
Moments Lab provides a flexible, effective and adaptable solution to the activity of the club and its teams, allowing us to promote the most iconic images, the most famous matches, and the most beautiful goals to all our different target outlets and markets.
I am delighted with the great listening skills and the responsiveness of the Moments Lab teams, who have given us confidence and advice since day one.”
To date, over 16000 pictures have been ingested to Moments Lab Media Hub and 60 TB of archive media have been migrated. This includes 2000 hours of video recovered to date. The library is being added to all the time, with 600 hours of new video generated per year. In addition, Moments Lab's AI was trained to recognize personalities from the club, including professional male and female players, staff and board members.
A stronghold of French football in the 1940s and 1950s, the Lille Olympique Sporting Club (LOSC) has been showing constant progress since the beginning of the 2000s. In 2007, the club has inaugurated the Domaine de Luchin, one of the most modern sports and administrative centers in Europe.
A regular participant in European competitions (8 times in the UEFA Champions League and in the UEFA Europa League), LOSC has acquired experience and international recognition throughout the years. In 2021, the northern club became a French champion for the fourth time in its history.
Now led by Olivier Létang, the Lille club continues to progress season after season, driven by ambitious sporting and economic growth and thanks to its commitment to high performance, training and social impact.
Moments Lab (ex Newsbridge) is a cloud media hub platform for live & archived content.
Powered by Multimodal Indexing AI and a data driven indexing approach, Moments Lab provides unprecedented access to content by automatically detecting faces, objects, logos, written texts, audio transcripts and semantic context.
Whether it be for managing and accessing live recordings, clipping highlights, future friendly archiving, content retrieval or content showcasing and monetization - the solution allows for smart & efficient media asset management.
Today our platform is used by worldwide TV Channels, Press Agencies, Sports Rights Holders, Production Houses, Journalists, Editors and Archivists to boost their production workflow and media ROI.