Motivated by the challenges, risks and opportunities that the wide use of AI brings to media, society and politics, AI4Media aspires to become a centre of excellence and a wide network of researchers across Europe and beyond, with a focus on delivering the next generation of core AI advances to serve the key sector of Media, to make sure that the European values of ethical and trustworthy AI are embedded in future AI deployments, and to reimagine AI as a crucial beneficial enabling technology in the service of Society and Media. The AI4Media consortium, comprising 30 leading partners in the areas of AI and media (9 universities, 9 research centres, 12 industrial partners) and 35 associate members, will establish the networking infrastructure to bring together the currently fragmented European AI landscape in the field of media, and foster deeper and long-running interactions between academia and industry, including Digital Innovation Hubs. It will also shape a research agenda for media AI research, and implement research and innovation both with respect to cutting-edge technologies at the core of AI research, and within specific fields of media-related AI. AI4Media will provide a targeted funding framework through open calls, to speed up the uptake of innovations developed within the network. A PhD programme will further enhance links to the industry and the fostering and exchange of talent, while providing motivation to prevent brain drain, and a set of use cases will be developed by the network to demonstrate the impact of the achieved advances in the media sector. The Excellence Centre that is established during the AI4Media project, and the ecosystem that will grow around it, will provide a long-term basis for the support of AI excellence in Europe, long after the project end, with the aim of ensuring that Ethical AI guided by European values assumes a global leading role in the field of Media.

Nowadays, radio shows surpass linear broadcast feeds by increasingly revolving around user engagement, which encompasses audience interaction and experience personalisation. Indeed, a typical consumer increasingly interacts with the radio station through digital platforms and social media. Unfortunately, the tools to enable radio-makers to capitalize on these new kinds of media and interaction opportunities are premature at best, and are in addition ill-aligned with contemporary radio production workflows. MARCONI aims to bring radio experiences to the next level, enabling radio to safeguard its strong position in the European media market, while at the same time facilitating innovative ways of radio making. The goal is to enable fully interactive and personalised radio solutions, integrating broadcast radio with digital and social media, amounting to converged radio experiences. To realize this goal, MARCONI will pursue two concrete objectives. First, consumers will be able to interact with “live” radio through their preferred communication channel in ways that are richer than is feasible today, so that consumers feel more connected to the radio brand -even when not listening linearly- and better served in an individual way. Second, radio-makers will be given an integrated view on audience interactions and will be supported by interaction automation services. The net outcome will be enhanced audience engagement. MARCONI brings together a multi-disciplinary consortium to realize its vision. Several partners will focus on AI to automate processing of audio-visuals, text and social media posts. A radio redaction solutions provider is represented in the consortium to guarantee smooth integration in real operational workflows. MARCONI also includes broadcasters which will organise large-scale pilots with their respective communities. Finally, strong industry participation (SMEs and radio stations) ensures that the MARCONI market potential will be properly exploited.

Improving the accessibility of content for the Deaf community is an important goal for both EU governments and broadcast industry regulators. Although legislation is being used to coerce content producers and broadcasters to do so, the cost of producing sign-language content and the negative impact of having a sign-interpreter appearing on the content for hearing individuals has relegated sign-language programming to late nights or a small number of sign-presented programs. A low-cost solution for personalized sign-interpreted content creation can address both of these problems, leading to greater accessibility to media content for Deaf users. CONTENT4ALL proposes such a solution to the problem in the short-term, which is also commericalizable, and proposes innovations to technologies that can lead to automated sign-translation capabilities in long-term. To this end, it builds upon the technologies demonstrated by the consortium partners in previous EU projects. As a first development a remote signing apparatus (located off-premises of the broadcaster) will be produced to capture a human sign-interpreter’s signs, pose and facial expressions and to parameterize this information. Then, it will be rendered photo-realistically as a 3D representation of the human sign-interpreter at the broadcaster for production of the personalized stream for Deaf users. While this solution can be used commercially, resulting datasets will provide a vast source of information for learning how to parameterize sign information for translation purposes. The second development of CONTENT4ALL will focus on advancing the algorithms/models used to do so, with the intent to create an open dataset for further research into automated signing. Finally, CONTENT4ALL will demonstrate automated sign-translation applied to a real-world TV broadcasting scenario, which is envisaged to lead to new approaches and innovations in the area in the long-run.

Europe has an opportunity to have a leading position on Data Economy, particularly in B2B scenarios. Special focus must be placed on accessing, sharing and reuse of data in an environment of security and Trust, which are fundamental preconditions for the Data Economy. The support of pilot projects and innovation spaces for experimenting with cross-sector multi-stakeholder data innovation is therefore urgent. Efforts need to concentrate on the provision of trusted and secure privacy-aware analytics solutions allowing for the secure sharing of proprietary industrial data along with personal data. REACH aims to launch a sustainable European-wide second-generation incubator for data-fuelled start-ups & SMEs aiming to develop innovative experiments within data value chains. REACH will launch 3 Open Calls expecting to attract +500 data driven concept-applications and select 100 business ideas to undertake a 4-phases funnel Tech-Biz acceleration programme (EXPLORE - EXPERIMENT - EVOLVE - EXPOSE). REACH aims to support the generation of new data-fuelled products & services, drive the development of solid businesses, trigger revenue growth and foster the access to new funding rounds, by offering a full service pack consisted of: tech-training and experts, datasets, technological bricks for secure and trusted data value chains, computing infrastructures, business development training & coaches and up to €120k equity-free funding. REACH will demonstrate that Data Silos can be broken by enabling a multi-stakeholder cross-sectorial incubator to boost data-fuelled sustainable solutions, leveraged by the capacities of the best data-driven DIHs in Europe. Besides a solid consortium to access world class startups/ SMEs and deliver high valuable technological & business services, REACH integrates 3 DIHs and 9 public/ private data-providers and 2 private investor brokers. We aim to generate 10M€ volume investment for SMES creating 15 data value-chains delivering fit-to-market products

Video streaming consists in the encoding, transcoding, delivering, decoding & displaying of videos on smartphones, tablets, PCs, smart TVs & consoles. Videos distributed “over-the-top” (OTT) are streamed rather than distributed through traditional networks (broadcast, pay TV) and distributors (cable, satellite). OTT is a vibrant $25bn market (2016) poised for spectacular growth: by 2025, it will reach $129bn, a 5.2x increase driven by powerhouses like Netflix and YouTube. Habits are changing fast: by 2020, 32% of videos will be consumed OTT (16h/week), vs. 5% in 2000 (2h/week). Video streaming represents 63% of Internet traffic (2018) and is on the rise, going from 76k petabytes per month in 2018 to 160k in 2021 (x2.1) and driven by a push to 4K that quadruples traffic. While developed countries are challenged to address this surge, half of the World’s population still doesn’t have the Internet and is unlikely to be able to stream content when they get it, reinforcing the “Digital Divide”. Reducing this burden will lead to a faster, cheaper and more stable Internet. It will slash content delivery costs, which reach millions of dollars a month for media companies. It will result in major savings for Internet providers that invest ~$300bn/year in infrastructure, or give them the opportunity to achieve much more for a similar investment. Our goal is to decrease video streaming traffic by 80% while retaining video resolution and increasing quality. To do so, Artomatix and THEO will develop ENHANCEplayer, a solution that leverages Deep Learning to automatically increase the resolution and quality of videos on consumer devices. Built on top of THEO’s successful THEOplayer, it will consume the data of, say, a 360p video but display a High Definition one (1080p), effectively saving 84% in traffic. Public broadcasters NPO, RTP & VRT will help Artomatix & THEO define the product specifications, provide them with test videos and test the product once it is developed.