Rebuilding a local TV's web channel without moving its catalog — Communauté urbaine de Dunkerque

The Dunkirk urban community and its local channel

Corsaire TV is the local television channel of the Communauté urbaine de Dunkerque, the public body that groups the port city of Dunkirk, in northern France, with the towns around it, and it is the urban community that is the Videas customer. The channel films the area, its residents, and its cultural, sporting and community life, then publishes its programs online so anyone can watch them whenever they want.

Like many local channels, Corsaire TV does not run the technical side of its distribution itself: it worked with a provider, Novastream, which ran its web TV. That provider shut down.

To bring the channel back online, the urban community now relies on Videas, with one detail that makes this case interesting: none of its videos moved.

The challenge: rebuilding a web TV without moving a catalog

A channel loses its technical foundation

When the provider hosting and assembling a web TV stops, the whole storefront disappears: the page, the way programs are organized, the address the audience knows. The videos still exist, but nothing presents them any more.

Corsaire TV therefore had to rebuild its channel, without starting from scratch on the content side.

A catalog already online, somewhere else

The channel’s entire catalog is published on Dailymotion. Years of programs, reports and event coverage, already online, already indexed, each with its own address and player.

Moving that catalog would have meant re-uploading everything, redoing the links, and losing the history of what was already published along the way. For a local newsroom, that is a project with no connection to the problem at hand.

An address to win back

One last point, and not a small one for a media outlet: the web TV has to live at the broadcaster’s own address, not on a page hosted by a third party and carrying its name. That is where the audience comes back, and it is what makes a channel more than a list of videos.

The Videas solution

A library that lists what already exists

Corsaire TV adds its Dailymotion videos to its Videas library, with nothing re-uploaded. The programs are gathered, organized and easy to find in one place, even though the video files themselves never move.

That is the point of this deployment: Videas adapts to what the customer already has, instead of requiring a move first. The library and the channel themselves run on a European platform, hosted in the EU, which matters to a broadcaster funded by a public authority.

A channel at their own address: corsairetv.fr

From that library, the channel publishes its web TV on corsairetv.fr, built with Channels. Programs are sorted into sections, and the audience finds a complete channel at Corsaire TV’s own address.

The newsroom decides what gets featured, with no outside technical work involved.

What Videas does not do here, deliberately

In this project, Videas hosts no video and plays none: the files stay on Dailymotion, and it is the Dailymotion player that appears when a visitor starts a program. Audience statistics come from the same source.

Corsaire TV therefore uses two things from Videas, the library and the channel, and nothing else. No live streaming, no hosting, no player. A local channel that has already settled the question of video hosting can adopt only the part it is missing.

Results

A channel standing again:

• The web TV is back online after the provider shut down, at corsairetv.fr.
• Programs are sorted into sections and available to the audience, as before.

An untouched catalog:

• No video was re-uploaded or moved: the Dailymotion catalog stayed exactly as it was.
• The relaunch required no file migration.

An autonomous newsroom:

• Programs are gathered in one place in the library, giving the team an overview of its own catalog.
• The channel is run by the broadcaster itself.

Why Videas when the catalog already lives elsewhere

The Dunkirk urban community’s case answers a situation local channels and regional media know well:

• No obligation to move: a video already published elsewhere can be listed in the library and shown on the channel.
• A channel at its own address: the web TV carries the media outlet’s name, not a platform’s.
• A scope you choose: take the library and the channel, and keep whatever already works.
• A European supplier: the library and the channel run on a platform hosted in the EU, a point public broadcasters are asked about.
• A fast recovery when a provider stops: the work concerns the storefront, not the files.

Videas works with the Dunkirk urban community and Corsaire TV on exactly that scope, the one needed to bring the web TV back online.