If you compare Luxembourg’s population with its successful Tour de France participants, you immediately understand why cycling has become the small country’s national sport. Since the first “Grand Boucle,” which started 100 years ago, 15 Luxembourgish cycling greats have celebrated 70 stage victories in the Tour. Five Luxembourgers have already won the most famous bike race in the world and were able to take the yellow jersey home at the end of the three-week ordeal. It’s no wonder, then, that cycling is also one of the hottest topics these days for one of the country’s most important daily newspapers, the Luxemburger Wort.
With its own team of journalists and photographers on site, the news portal of the Luxemburger Wort, wort.lu, offers its readers a daily updated video coverage. Using Brightcove, a small team manages the site’s entire video content directly from the wort.lu newsroom and provides online videos, smaller video reports of one to five minutes, and other formats such as longer video interviews. During the entire Tour, cycling fans can keep up-to-date with the Tour live ticker on wort.lu and can access the official video summaries from the organizers, the Amaury Sport Organization (ASO), on the website every evening. And of course, the newspaper, which is published by Verlag Saint-Paul Luxembourg S.A. with a daily print run of 85,000 copies, hopes that cyclists from Luxembourg will once again be at the forefront of the race in this Tour anniversary year.
One of the key factors in the publisher’s decision to implement Brightcove in 2012 was that Luxembourg has one of the highest mobile usage rates in Europe. In a country where residents are increasingly accessing news while on the move, reliable and high-quality video delivery on a wide range of platforms is essential. With our Video Cloud SDK, the wort.lu development team was able to develop mobile applications for the wort.lu site shortly after the two-week implementation. The smooth implementation was based on our extensive documentation and in collaboration with our support team.
Localization also drew the attention of the publishing decision-makers at DMEXCO 2012 to Brightcove because wort.lu offers both its Tour de France coverage and its entire editorial content in German, French, English, and Portuguese. This means that the editorial team can use Brightcove to automate label or other standard texts for their video content, such as subtitles, in multiple languages.
For Marc Thill, editor-in-chief of Luxemburger Wort, the strategic direction of wort.lu in the video sector is clear: “Our online and print editorial teams are slowly growing together, and for that we needed a solution like Brightcove that can grow with our future video needs, which will surely increase. In particular, as far as traffic generation for our internet news portal wort.lu is concerned, the annual Tour de France coverage is a fixed highlight of the year for our readers, who are traditionally enthusiastic about cycling.”
The publisher is aware that its digital offering also has to prove itself daily in the growing competition for internet dominance beyond such major sporting events in order to maintain and expand the leading position of wort.lu in the Luxembourg news market. With Brightcove, says Marc Thill, the publishing house has met the necessary technical conditions. The wort.lu newsroom team can now deliver its online video content dynamically and reliably to its various mobile and online user groups on a daily basis without much technical effort. The publishing house can now also respond to the steadily increasing demand from wort.lu advertising partners for close cooperation in the online sector by offering a new range of video advertising options thanks to the use of Brightcove. The analytics function, which is important for successful monetization in the video market, is included in the Brightcove package.
