ARTE Live Web reborn as ARTE Concert

The bi-lingual platform in French and German regularly serves live video streams of concerts and stage performances from all over Europe in addition to a bouquet of a few hundred recordings from a wide variety of genres available as video on demand.
13.02.2014
Tags

ARTE Concert is one of ARTE’s most successful web properties, although it is more widely known in France than in Germany. The bi-lingual platform in French and German regularly serves live video streams of concerts and stage performances from all over Europe in addition to a bouquet of a few hundred recordings from a wide variety of genres available as video on demand.

For example the current selection spans from the Requiem by Hector Berlioz (Classical Music) over the Festival Flamenco de Nîmes (Dance) and the Festival Mondial du Cirque de Demain (Circus), the David Murray Big Band (Jazz) and a concert by The Notwist (Independent Rock) to the performances of heavy metal bands at the Hellfest festival. In addition to the recordings themselves the site provides a host of corollary materials, background information, interviews, magazine articles, information about festivals and other events and their sponsors. Fans can create personal accounts to manage live recording reminders and collect a list of favorite concerts. The site also offers integration with major social media networks or platforms like facebook, twitter and disqus. The social media aspect as well as the personalization features of the site will be vastly improved during the coming months.

kreuzwerker functioned as the prime contractor for the technical relaunch of the web platform based on Drupal. To this end kreuzwerker sourced and coordinated Drupal talent from it’s network.

The site was built in a joint endeavor in the best of european traditions by

ARTE (France/Germany) with Bertram Gugel (Germany, functional requirements and IA) and Xprime (France, design and static HTML) and

kreuzwerker (project management, QA and some development) with Alex Wilde (Germany, development), Marzee Labs (Spain, development), Your Source (Netherlands, development), and Maarten Steurs (Belgium, development)

The main goals of the platform’s relaunch were:

  • technical migration from a legacy in-house CMS to Drupal
  • modularization and abstraction of core features for reuse on other Drupal based platforms of ARTE (e.g. ARTE Creative, ARTE Future, ARTE Info
  • full integration into the ARTE’s IT infrastructure and video workflows
  • rebranding of what was previously ARTE Live Web
  • graphical redesign and an overhaul of the information architecture based on a responsive grid layout for an optimized experience on mobile devices
  • more social networking, recommendation and personalization features
  • improved editorial workflows
  • enhancement of the player’s features
  • better search experience

All in all, the project has been a blast and we believe the results speak for themselves. Thanks again to everyone involved for the great collaboration!