During events like elections, media organizations have to live up to audience expectations and provide accurate and up-to-the-minute information. This holds all the more true for France Télévisions as a public service organization.

"The widget allowed us to fulfill our public service mission, even outside the French territory, with a dynamic display of the election results as and when they became available," said Olivier Lendresse, Head of Sports and News Services at France Télévisions Éditions Numériques (FTVEN).

The af83 team paid special attention to the design of the user interfaces. Responsive and intuitive, they feature dynamic infographics to quickly visualize estimates, results and projections drilled down into particular geographic levels on a wide range of devices.

"This project was challenging in more ways than one: the widget had to be capable of handling workload peaks in the order of several million pages during the election weekend. There were also the issues of managing phases in order to comply with the legal restrictions on the publication of estimates and results, and testing beforehand the streams coming from the French Ministry of Interior," said Bruno Michel, af83 CTO, and Maxim Benadon, Lead Front Developer. "It was a critical project and we had no room for error: everything had to be ready and 100% operational for the polls."

In addition to the widgets available on its own platforms, France Télévisions has also made freely available a fully customizable widget that can be easily embedded into any website or platform. Since its launch, the widget has seen a rapid adoption by leading media websites worldwide: The United States (The Wall Street Journal), the United Kingdom (The Telegraph), Spain (El Pais), Belgium (Le Soir), Italy (Il Corriere della Serra), and other countries, as well as many French blogs and websites.

(Images courtesy of Groupe France Télévisions)