A universe of media assets and co-creation opportunities at your fingertips

Project Information

MediaVerse

Grant agreement ID: 957252

DOI

10.3030/957252

Project closed

EC signature date 29 July 2020

Start date 1 October 2020

End date 30 September 2023

Funded under

• INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP - Leadership in enabling and industrial technologies - Information and Communication Technologies (ICT)

Total cost

€ 5 995 612,50

EU contribution

€ 4 932 997,50

Coordinated by

ETHNIKO KENTRO EREVNAS KAI TECHNOLOGIKIS ANAPTYXIS
Greece

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - MediaVerse (A universe of media assets and co-creation opportunities at your fingertips)

Reporting period: 2021-10-01 to 2023-09-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The MediaVerse project was conceived in a context of a fast-evolving media industry characterized by incumbent and rapidly growing digital platforms (e.g. Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok) that have content creation and sharing as the basis of their business model. Such actors have grown to the point that they can be considered as central authorities, and as a result they impose their own policies and terms in defining what type of user-generated content is desirable, visible or even allowed to be shared and monetized. There are numerous other issues stemming from this centralisation of authority, including the demonetization of creative media content, opaqueness of decision making with respect to content moderation and the non-transparent and often unpredictable way in which these platforms permit third parties to integrate with them.

This is a particularly important problem for society, especially for European citizens for a number of reasons: a) from an economic point of view, the value of content creation is largely captured by the large digital platforms, most of which are based in the US; b) from a data protection point of view, there is very little control and accountability over how European citizens' data is managed by the large digital platforms; c) from a freedom of expression and creativity point of view, there have been numerous incidents where the decisions and strategies of these platforms have unfairly disadvantaged certain companies, groups, or individuals, by limiting access to their services. Overall, it becomes increasingly clear that the European media sector and society is in need of alternative platforms for creating and sharing media content that do not rely on central authorities or companies.

The MediaVerse project was conceived with exactly this problem in mind. Its mission was to create a decentralized network of intelligent and accessible tools for digital asset management, allowing barrier-free usage and integration in target media and platforms. The project had the vision to lay the foundations to allow professionals and laymen alike to express themselves by publishing multimedia content that may be easily shared and licensed and to empower European stakeholders to enjoy and produce inclusive, diverse, respectful and credible media experiences. To pursue this ambitious vision, MediaVerse set the following eight objectives:

- Provide a decentralized framework of interconnected digital asset management systems (MV nodes) for the exchange of media content
- Automate copyright negotiation; support content ownership identification during content exchange
- Introduce novel tools and methods for the next generation media analysis and annotation
- Provide tools that foster accessibility-by-design content creation and enrichment
- Provide innovative XR authoring tools for cost-effective production of immersive media experiences
- Provide social feedback channels to the creative editorial process and immersive co-creation opportunities
- Perform large scale pilots with diverse stakeholders and end users
- Develop and execute a sound dissemination and exploitation plan with a clear path to market.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

By the end of the project the consortium made important progress towards its objectives in the following ways:
Technical partners have worked together to implement the MediaVerse decentralised framework of digital asset management systems. The final release of the MediaVerse platform was achieved, presenting a report containing the updated system architecture based on the analysis of user requirements, as well as the final results from components integration and testing. Seven MV nodes have been installed by different partners.
Thorough legal and technical analysis of content IPR issues has been carried out, presenting a functional and technical description of the content discovery system, copyright compatibilities and blockchain infrastructure inside MediaVerse. Moreover, the legal and ethical compliance of the project offers legal support for IPR management.
The latest advances in deep learning for media annotation have been tested for text, images, videos, and 3D content. Several analysis models have been deployed as part of a Media Annotation service. Software components, as well as improvements and additions in the Media Annotation Service and the adopted retrieval and recommendation technologies were described. Furthermore, a Media Asset Annotation and Management (MAAM) platform, evolved as a fork out of the main MediaVerse platform.
Accessibility-by-design in content creation and enrichment has been supported by the accessibility toolset (i.e. automatic subtitle generation, editing and semantic enrichment), outlining the progress made in creating an accessible platform, ensuring equal access to information and content for all. Many of these features have been tested in pilots and the evaluation results have been reported.
The Fader and VRodos XR authoring tools have been integrated to the MediaVerse platform to the extent that was deemed necessary by the pilots and user requirements.
In the domain of social analytics, significant changes were announced by Twitter/X in 2023, including limitations to API access and pricing. To counter this, the Social Analytics Engine was updated with new functionalities, including the creation of PDF reports, improvements in trending and alerting, the introduction of manual sentiment editing, and the creation of a new web application for mass correction of entity extractions.
Large-scale pilot activities have successfully taken place for all Use Cases and the final evaluation results were reported.
Consortium partners performed a variety of dissemination and communication activities, including presentations to events, trainings, clustering activities, blog posts, and publications. Also, an elaborate version of the exploitation plan, along with market analysis activities, have been delivered.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

MediaVerse achieved progress beyond the state of the art in a number of scientific and technological areas, including new capabilities for web-based XR experience authoring and consumption, new user-adapted media annotation methods catered for the needs of next generation media content, a flexible content moderation toolset that can be configured to the needs of different communities, more efficient content identification solutions that can support effective retrieval in a decentralized setting, and advances in sequence-aware recommender systems. Importantly, all these advances are accessible through an open decentralized network of media asset management systems, where everyone can join or set up a new node based on their needs. This network can enable the monetization of media content directly by its owners and the development and deployment of novel services by third parties. In that way, MediaVerse achieved its vision of fair and trustworthy media sharing, and the support for sophisticated next generation media services.

mediaverse-architecture.png

training-students-on-maam.png

piloting-vr-in-mediaverse.png