Agence Régionale de Développement Paris Île-de-France

You are here : Homepage > Paris Region’s economy > Sectors of excellence > Image and multimedia

An exceptional brand image

Paris Region is France's premier region for the imaging and multimedia industry, covering the full spectrum of activities - video games, images, sound and interactivity, digital heritage, digital education, services and practices - on a scale found only in a few major cities such as Tokyo, New York and San Francisco.

With half the country's imaging companies concentrated in Paris Region, French and international companies benefit from all the technical and artistic talent associated with the industry as well as an exceptional cultural environment. A dense network of SMEs involved in state-of-the-art technologies plus a number of public and private-sector research laboratories ensure that the sector has access to the latest innovations. The resulting synergies and partnerships underpin the creative process, an essential factor when competing in the global marketplace.

Main players

A number of internationally renowned companies operating in the digital technologies and applications sector are located in Paris Region: TF1 (leading European channel for HDTV), Thomson (digital leisure products, global leader for the duplication of film/VHS/DVD, broadcasting equipment and consumer telephony equipment), Thales (search engines), Ubisoft (video games), Gameloft (video games on mobiles), CNS (E-education), INA (audiovisual heritage preservation), Attitude Studio (3D animation), Mikros (special effects), etc. These giants are joined by a multitude of small start-ups emerging thanks to an exceptional capacity for innovation, such as Exalead (search engines), Archos (portable video recorders) and Streamezzo (rich media mobile). Several hundred companies associated with digital technologies and applications start up in Paris Region every year. The Paris Region environment attracts a host of foreign companies such as Bluestreak Technologies, a Canadian company specialised in software development and the integration of rich media on mobiles which chose Paris Region in 2006 as a gateway to the European market.

Paris Region is also France's leading video games platform: 65% of the country's studios are located here (games designers, developers, publishers).

Capital Games, Système Productif Local (SPL), is a key video games development organisation. It brings together all the Paris Region actors in this sector and spearheads initiatives to strengthen the video games industry (shared R&D costs, promoting the industry and its studios internationally etc.).

Research and training

12,000 researchers are involved in R&I related to the industry.

Top-quality training fosters a dynamic, creative approach and the Region boasts a number of prestigious institutions including the celebrated École des Gobelins in the visual arts sector, engineering schools like the École Normale Supérieure, Centrale Paris and Telecoms Paris, specialist schools like ISART Digital (advanced institute for digital art) and universities such as the Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris 8, Marne la Vallée and Leonardo da Vinci.

The Region's talented graduates are much in demand all over the world, particularly in the United States. French artistic and creative potential is recognised worldwide through the "French Touch" label. One example, "Rayman", one of the world's best-known video games, was created at the Ubisoft studios in Montreuil.

To boost their influence in the face of increasingly fierce competition, many of these companies have come together in the Cap Digital competitiveness cluster.