24/24 actu: the first 100% TV, press and radio news engine

Orange is creating a new type of internet service making it easier to access and search for news information. The service includes editorial content from France’s leading professional media.
Developed in the Orange Labs, a pioneering service is today being launched for testing.
24/24 actu is a new type of multimedia news search engine, providing access to a range of sources of news information in a single dedicated service.
24/24 actu will be opening up a new dimension for all internet users at no cost, engaging them in a personal approach for putting news into perspective. By offering users immediate access to all sources (online press, radio and TV) relating to the coverage of an event, this service will transform how we keep ourselves informed and will enable us to benefit from a complete observation post covering different points of view.

Orange leading the way for media partnerships
The huge volume of news managed by 24/24 actu stems from a series of partnerships sealed between Orange and the main French media, all recognized professional media: TV (BFM TV, Euronews, France 24, LCP-AN, Public Sénat, TV5 Monde), radio (BFM, Europe 1, Radio France, RFI, RMC, RTL), online press (La Tribune, L’Équipe, L’Expansion, L’Express, Le Figaro, Le JDD, Le Monde, Le Parisien, Le Point, Les Échos, Libération, Paris-Match).
Through these agreement, 24/24 actu will only distribute content from professional media.

Following an initial test phase (beta testing), the aim is to find a business model that is satisfactory for all the various partners.

a simple service respecting the range of editorial content
24/24 actu is built around a new search experience, with its homepage presenting a ranking of news based on the freshness of coverage and frequency, as well as a “Headline of Headlines”. This approach will also be used to rank the main areas of news: international, politics, society, economy, sport and culture. In this way, everyone will be able to discover, at a given time and for a given event, the frequency of its coverage, how many leading media have reported on it and their preferred angles.
24/24 actu will offer an interface enabling intuitive navigation through the news, with content drawn from leading French media: television channels, radio stations, online press sites and newspapers. The extracts from programs, reports and articles will be automatically grouped together and ranked for each news category and subject, making it possible to access news across a range of media that is ranked by information category and by angle.

powerful algorithms developed in the Orange Labs
24/24 actu uses a series of automated technologies enabling video, audio and text content to be indexed and consolidated for each news subject before being ranked.
This indexing system is based on capturing the content (video or audio) and creating metadata (information sent by the media, captured online, acquired through subtitles). Thanks to this metadata and the automatic detection of changes in shots, the videos can be split into sections that provide direct access to the right subject, saving internet users from having to watch an entire video before reaching the part they are actually interested in. Similarly, online press sites can be accessed through deep links (direct access to articles). Following this indexing phase, 24/24 actu has a content database.

The engine then classifies the content for each news subject and ranks the subjects based on objective criteria: the freshness of content and frequency. Each selection of content is automatically assigned a weighting that enables the algorithm to identify de facto the most recent and widely covered subjects. In this way, no one particular point of view or source is given priority: with 24/24 actu, the different media and resources are treated equally.

24/24 actu is launched
The beta test for 24/24 actu will be available as of April 15th to users who will have been invited (through sponsoring or requests on the site). During this phase, 24/24 actu is going to see major changes and developments in order to enrich the user experience and fix any bugs.
Thanks to the beta testers’ support, 24/24 actu will be opening up in France to all web users over the next few months, and could then be ramped up to cover other countries.
New advanced technologies developed by Orange Labs, including speech2text (recognition of speech in video or audio sequences), facial recognition or even voice-based speaker recognition, could be incorporated into subsequent versions of 24/24 actu.

info-consumption
With 24/24 actu, Orange is today offering a new standard for the consumption of information, which should quickly win over the 42% of internet users who regularly browse or search news online.
24/24 actu is being launched at a time when news-consumers, particularly young people who tend to prefer image-based media, are using a growing number and range of information sources. According to research published by Médiamétrie-WSA in February 2009, “Digital Natives” (the generation aged 18 to 24 who have had access since very early on to an “all digital” environment) are breaking all the records for media and multimedia contacts over an average weekday. 83.4% of them are in contact with the news at least once a day, primarily through the television and radio, then the press and internet. They are looking for images, real-time updates and keywords, and consume news essentially in brief formats. Faced with the many sources of information, 18 to 24-year-olds are looking for reassurance concerning the reliability of information: they trust the main media brands, which are recognized and legitimate and which they therefore consider to be serious and reliable.