Less than two weeks before its launch, the vast newsroom at France 24 was a hive of activity, gearing up for the "global battle" against the English-language giants of world-wide non-stop television news.
Dozens of multi-lingual journalists feverishly worked on dry-runs of 10-minute news bulletins in French, English and Arabic, for what will be the first French 24/7 international TV news channel.
"Five, four, three, two, one," the production team counted in Arabic the cue for news presenter Hakim Beltifa as he rehearsed at the brand new three-storey hub in the television heartland of Paris' southern outskirts.
"Things are going very, very well. The Arabic text for the autocue is not easy, configuring the machine. So we had this type of problem at the start (but) it was resolved very quickly," the 29-year-old Tunisian said.
Paint was still drying on the walls and carpet being laid in the corridors, but the pristine hi-tech studios appeared ready-to-roll for the debut when France 24 hits the airwaves. Close to the heart of President Jacques Chirac who has said he hoped it would place France at the forefront of the "global battle of images," France 24 promises a French perspective on world events.
"Well, today for example, we did a huge amount on Lebanon and we were thinking very much about the French involvement in Lebanon now, 63 years after independence," said breakfast news presenter Catherine Galloway.
"We're thinking what kind of country did France leave, same with Rwanda which was a big story for us yesterday," said the 32-year-old, who previously worked for Radio France Internationale and Deutsche Welle.
She was about to record "A Week in the Americas," a weekly feature in English focusing on different regions of the globe. Exactly the same show will go out in parallel, in French, requiring close collaboration between Galloway and her French counterpart.
France 24 will launch to great fanfare on December 6 initially via Internet streaming, with television kicking off on satellite and cable a day or so later - one channel in French, plus a second predominantly-English channel.
Arabic is scheduled from mid-2007, though the website will be trilingual from the outset. Plans are afoot to add Spanish in 2009.
Coming hard on the heels of the launch of Qatar-based Al-Jazeera's English-language news channel, France 24 will try to shoulder into a competitive market for round-the-clock TV news dominated by CNN and BBC World.
But France 24's Gerard Saint-Paul, chief officer in charge of news and programming and formerly New York and Washington correspondent for France's TF1 television, is confident there is enough room for a French channel.
"A French eye, to me, is panoramic, very diversified, very open, which takes into its field of vision all countries with an equal journalistic curiosity," he told AFP in an interview.
He saw the American way of looking at things as "much more unipolar," stressing that this was in no way meant as anti-Americanism, and he was keen to voice respect for the United States and to compliment the channel's rivals.