VIRTUOSA addresses the needs of the Media & Entertainment (M&E) industry to increase efficiency and reduce cost for media production to meet the growing consumer demand for more content on more channels and more devices and for more live content. Live content is of cultural and social interest for all citizen in Europe and globally; these are sport or music events, daily news, governmental speeches or historical events. The market for Live content is huge and predicted to reach globally USD 545 bn with the clear majority (66%) coming from broadcast Live TV. VIRTUOSA will revolutionise live media production through Virtualisation of network and production resources. It is a new generation of media networks based on cutting-edge IP technology, Software-Defined Networking (SDN) technology, High Performance Computing, and Cloud Computing. Virtualisation is the key to make live media production more efficient, easy scalable and cost-efficient. It enables sharing production facilities, equipment, resources, and talents across locations with >1000 km in distance . Live media production costs will be reduced by 30-40%, and more Live content can be easily produced in parallel. Objective of the VIRTUOSA project is to demonstrate and validate our new VIRTUOSA product in operational environment and to complete commercial and production preparations for product launch within this 24-month project. Our VIRTUOSA product consists of three core elements: 1) A tailor-made Software Defined Network Architecture solution for SDN-based LAN & WAN and 5G acquisition, 2) High performance SDN-based Media Server and Ethernet/IP switches, and 3) a Software for Media Network Management and self-Service Orchestration. According to the need of our end-users – broadcasters, content producers, media service providers – we design tailor-made solutions for installation at their facilities with and without the connection to remote locations (remote studio, stadium, event).

The project will deliver MPAT – an extensible platform for the simple creation of interactive multi-media applications. In recent years the convergence of TV and online media has been increasing with dramatic pace. The boundaries between TV and personal media are dissolving rapidly. HbbTV is a key driver in this; enabling media companies to deploy interactive services for TV to a wide audience by building on top of a single standard. In many European markets, over 90% of Connected TVs, sold today, are HbbTV-enabled. Features including catch-up TV and interactive advertisements have already proved to be a great success because of their accessibility to the consumer and integration with the TV. Another recent milestone was the publication of HbbTV release 2.0, moving to state-of-the-art HTML5 and offering built in support for bi-directional multi-screen services as well as media and application synchronisation. Developing HbbTV applications from scratch requires considerable resources and for this reason they are often simply too costly for single formats or shows to contemplate. MPAT is the solution; motivated by a WordPress-like technical and business approach, MPAT makes application development affordable and sustainable while creating a new eco-system for content creators, theme and plug-in developers alike. With MPAT, media companies can semi-automatically author their set of customised applications that are then populated with content by the editorial staff or by linking MPAT to existing content management solutions. The open-source MPAT core will provide all the essential features to create compelling multi-screen experiences for HbbTV and other HTML5-based devices. The Consortium comprises key stakeholders from the HbbTV and media domain who will jointly deliver a sound and close-to-market solution thoroughly validated through an exhaustive set of pilots.

HRADIO (Hybrid Radio everywhere for everyone) focuses on radio service innovations enabled by convergence. While radio, with its rich editorial content, remains a highly popular medium, listening figures are slowly declining, particularly among youngsters. With the rapid rise of smartphones, radio faces competition from many new services including music steaming platforms. Regular radio today often does not include attractive features as known from vertical platforms. And if present, they are mostly not well integrated with the actual radio programme. This is where HRADIO will deliver. Driven by the industry need to create attractive new radio experiences, the project will leverage the full potential of hybrid technology for radio – enabling the integration of cost-effective broadcast distribution with new online features. Broadcasters will be enabled to personalise radio services (while respecting privacy), to provide intuitive functionalities like time-shifting and, eventually, to foster and to exploit user engagement. HRADIO will pave the way to bring these features not only to broadcasters’ native mobile applications, but also to portals, to connected radios and into the car. The core approach is to integrate validated solutions and to harmonise APIs which together will provide broadcasters with an abstracted service layer accessible across any device and distribution platform – ensuring sustainability and return of investment. Therefore, consumers will be able to access their personal radio services on different devices and platforms enabled by a seamless broadcast-internet integration for radio content distribution. All features will be tested in 3 phases of large-scale pilots involving broadcasters, app developers for mobile and automotive devices. Eventually, HRADIO will publish its developments as ready-to-use Android and HTML client implementations including an extensive set of well documented APIs fostering new service developments for the radio sector.

Surveys show that, although around 80% of people are using a second device (phone, tablet or laptop) when watching TV only 20% of them are engaging with ‘companion content’.The 2-IMMERSE project will innovate around the delivery of experiences that are created to be multi-screen in production yet delivered to be flexible across single and multiple-screens and responsive to the preferences of individual audience members. We will build and trial services that deliver multi-screen experiences of high value content including theatre, Grand Prix motorcycle racing and live professional football in the home, in school and in public venues. The resulting delivery platform will be open to extension by third parties enabling new genres of multi-screen experiences to be created for content beyond sport and Drama. New multi-screen services will merge content from broadcast and broadband sources and support new visualisations, viewpoints, data and replay facilities in addition to social network functionality such as chatting, commenting, polling The goal of 2-IMMERSE is to allow TV service providers to break free from the constraints of rendering a broadcast stream onto a single 16x9 frame and to develop compelling experiences that combine synchronised, interactive and customisable content service applications to provide individual and shared content customized to the number and type of screens available and the preferences of the audience. In doing so our aim is to open up to audiences capabilities for configuration and control only available currently to producers and presenters (e.g. “show replay again here, keep the leaderboard on this tablet and the view of the crowd on that second wall screen”).