M6 Group Powers Production Across France with Avid

Formed in 1987 and based in Neuilly, France, M6 Group is the driving force behind M6—the most profitable national television network in France. The organization produces and distributes a wide range of original programming to audiences across France, including news, documentaries, web content, and more.

M6 currently employs more than 1,800 media professionals across multiple departments, and until recently, each division used different media management systems, databases, and workflows. To more efficiently create, manage, and share its content, M6 needed a centralized workflow that would unify all of the departments and team members in the organization.

To overcome the challenges of managing a high volume of media, the M6 Group decided to embrace the Avid Everywhere vision and unify their entire workflow with an Avid media management system centered upon Interplay | MAM. Interplay | MAM provides M6 with a centralized workflow that enables the organization to share purchased content between 50 users and 4 departments, enhance collaboration between team members, and save time and resources throughout the entire organization.

Improving workflow efficiency

Previously, disparate M6 departments each used different workflows, databases, and systems, which hampered productivity and made collaboration difficult. The company needed to merge all of its existing workflows, digitize their existing tape archive, and enable its teams to use the same media archive simultaneously. To address these challenges, Mathias Béjanin, technical director at M6, put together an experienced team to complete a strategic digital asset management project.

“All of our old workflows and systems were limited, and did not allow easy collaboration between departments,” Béjanin explains. “We needed a solution that would enable us to easily share media among our different departments.”

After extensive consultation with M6 management, Avid Professional Services analyzed the company’s specific pain points and then developed specific functionalities and configured the Interplay | MAM system to meet the company’s unique requirements. Working with M6’s technical and engineering departments, the Avid team integrated the Interplay | MAM system seamlessly into the company’s existing infrastructure.

Succeeding with a unified workflow

With Interplay | MAM, M6 is able to reduce operational costs by sharing purchased content among multiple divisions within the organization. In the past, departments sometimes purchased identical images from media suppliers—wasting valuable time and money. Now, the metadata information for licensed media is standardized and easily accessible, which simplifies the exchange of data among departments.

Additionally, editors and journalists can now access media much faster than before. Prior to Interplay | MAM, gathering content for a story was a time-consuming and laborious process that required documentalists to restore and digitize large amounts of media—some of which was never used. Now, the documentalists can easily prepare edit lists of low-resolution proxy files before they restore the media. The journalist can log in, quickly view the media, and then decide what content needs to be restored for the story.

“With Interplay | MAM, we are able to work much more quickly and efficiently than before,” notes Béjanin. “Plus, edit lists allow our team members to collaborate remotely—they no longer need to be in the same building to review content.”

Interplay | MAM also enables M6 to automate time-consuming workflows that previously required extensive manual labor. For example, M6 frequently imports images from news organizations like Reuters. In the past, there was no interface between the agency delivery system and the M6 media archive, which meant that an archivist needed to type the information for the images into the system manually. Now, the images and the corresponding metadata are automatically imported into Interplay | MAM from outside suppliers—saving half a workday each time images are imported.

"With Interplay | MAM, our archivists are able to cut down the time it takes to reference the images we acquire from outside agencies,” says Martine Carouge, head of information research at M6. “We can now make our archival content available to journalists and other editorial departments much more quickly.”

“Avid Everywhere allows us to save valuable time and resources across our entire organization,” concludes Béjanin. “Thanks to Interplay | MAM, we now have a workflow that will enable us to thrive as our company moves forward.”