Anthony Capon is Product Director for RMC and BFM’s digital platforms. Here, he discusses a landmark project launched in March 2024: the in-house development of a vertical video feed on their platforms. The format was designed to address three key challenges facing the group: increasing user engagement, attracting a younger audience, and creating new monetization opportunities.
> BFM built a TikTok-style vertical video feed inside its own apps and site rather than only posting to the platforms. Eighteen months on it averages 2.5 million views a month > The engagement number is the interesting one. Each time someone opens the feed they watch seven to ten videos, which is exactly the behaviour they were trying to import > The hard part was never the content. Their 16:9 player couldn't handle smooth vertical scrolling, and video preloading, essential on 4G or patchy coverage, was the most complex piece to solve > Monetisation was designed in from day one rather than added later. Ads are preloaded too, on the same logic as the videos, so an ad never breaks the scroll > The whole thing ran on a five-person pilot team with one person per discipline: product, engineering, editorial, ad tech and marketing, meeting weekly with clear decision rights
For BFM, one of France’s most popular news brands and platforms, video is a strategic asset, a source of expertise and a competitive advantage. And it’s all the more important in an ecosystem where the current challenge is to engage and retain our audiences on our own platforms.
So, it seemed obvious to us that we needed to develop this content, in all its forms, depending on news cycles, audiences, and consumption environments.
On our BFM platforms, we felt that there was a need for a format that could boost engagement, attract a younger audience, and serve our business strategy.
Vertical video was the obvious choice:
- It has a history with us, as we launched BFMTV’s live video in vertical format a few years ago
- It’s already a very important product for BFM, feeding into heavy usage among our most active audiences on social media (particularly Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube)
- It’s a good branding lever for our editorial teams and brands, not to mention an opportunity for monetization through advertising
But between the idea discussed in a meeting with the editorial team and the moment you scroll through your first feed in the app…
Let’s just say Rome wasn’t built in a day!
Reproducing the addictive scroll: behind the scenes of creating vertical video in-house
For the Product & Tech teams, our starting point was pretty simple: how could we replicate the swiping motion we all use on Instagram or TikTok on our own player, with our constraints, our content, and our UX?
Before writing a single line of code, we launched a quick but effective discovery phase (a nod to ProductROI enthusiasts) because we knew where we were going.
The goal: beyond the extensive benchmarking (particularly among our US counterparts), we asked ourselves how we could understand the mechanics of vertical formats that capture so much attention—and how we could adapt them to our editorial and technical context.
Of course, we also added analyses of current video usage on our formats (themes and video formats that work, completion rates on our Live or VOD video formats, average session duration on video formats, etc.).
This phase allowed us to quickly identify what “hooks” our users: smooth scrolling, instant video playback, and the absence of functional friction.
From there, we moved on to defining and validating the user flow, followed by the initial designs.
Alongside these UX/UI advances, we still had the most complicated task ahead of us: the player…
