How SimoneBox Builds Its News Images — From France TV to the Screen

Morning, noon, evening — three times a day, the SimoneBox quietly refreshes itself. Around a dozen images per category are rebuilt, automatically, with no one involved. Each image brings together a background photo, a readable headline, and in the corner, a small square: the QR code. Here's how it all comes together.

Where does the information come from?

France Télévisions continuously publishes an updated list of its latest headlines — a kind of automatic notice board that any programme can consult remotely. Each entry contains three things: a headline, a short summary, and a link to the full article on the France TV website.

The SimoneBox consults this board three times a day, automatically. It pulls around ten headlines per category — general news, sport, culture — and turns each one into an image.

And the background photo?

France TV illustrates each article with a main photo. To find it, the SimoneBox briefly visits the article page — like opening a tab in a browser — and retrieves that photo automatically. If the page is unavailable or the article has no photo, it simply moves on to the next headline. No crash, no blank image.

Assembling the poster

The photo is downloaded. But it doesn't necessarily match the screen's dimensions — sometimes too wide, too tall, or square depending on the category. The SimoneBox screen is fixed.

Think of a printer who needs to mount a photo onto a fixed frame. They enlarge the photo until it fills the entire frame, without stretching it, then trim whatever sticks out. Result: always full screen, always sharp, never black bars on the sides.

On top of that adapted photo, a banner is added along the bottom — like the subtitles of a documentary, but wider. Its background is slightly transparent, letting the photo show through without making the text unreadable.

Text that adjusts itself

A news headline can be short or very long. The banner, however, has a fixed size. The text has to adapt automatically to whatever needs to be displayed.

It works a bit like a newspaper layout editor who has to fit headlines of very different lengths into the same space. When the headline is short, the letters are large and comfortable to read. When it's long, they shrink so everything fits — down to a minimum size below which readability would be sacrificed.

To keep the text readable regardless of what photo lies beneath — a dark background, a bright sky, white snow — each letter is drawn twice: first a slightly dark outline, then white text on top. The effect is subtle but ensures the headline is always legible, whatever the image.

The QR code — the door to the full article

In the corner of the banner, a small white square against the dark background. That's the QR code. It contains the address of the full article on the France TV website.

If a piece of news catches Simone's attention, she points her iPhone at it, and the article opens straight away. No need to type anything, no need to remember a website address. One gesture, one read.

Three times a day, without anyone doing anything

This whole process — consulting the headlines, finding the photos, assembling the images — repeats three times a day: early morning, lunchtime, early evening. In under a minute, around ten images per category are ready. The old ones are replaced, the new ones take their place.

All three categories run at the same time. While general news is refreshing, sport and culture are doing the same. That's what keeps the whole thing quick.

What it looks like on screen

The result is an image every twenty seconds or so. A headline. A photo. A QR code if she wants to know more. Simone doesn't know there's a programme behind it. That's exactly what we were going for.

The best technology is the kind you stop noticing. Not because it's hidden — because what it produces feels natural enough that you never think to question it.

What could still be improved

The system has been running without interruption for two years. But using it day to day, a few limitations have emerged.

If France TV is momentarily unreachable when the process starts, the old images are deleted but nothing replaces them. Simone ends up with empty categories until the next cycle. Not critical, but worth fixing — it would be enough to keep the previous images as a backup when something goes wrong.

Some photos published by France TV are poor quality or very text-heavy — infographics, screenshots — that don't look good enlarged on a big screen. A filter to skip these images would improve the overall presentation.

Today, all images are rebuilt at every cycle, even when the articles haven't changed. A smarter system would only rebuild what's actually new. Same result, less unnecessary work.

These improvements are on the list. In the meantime, the current system does what it was designed to do — quietly, reliably, since day one.

To understand all of the SimoneBox's features — photos, weather, radio — here's what Simone sees and what runs behind the screen →