Vision
CITIZEN MEDIA applications
In the past media production and distribution was considered a one-way system. The media experts would produce the content, the telecommunication and broadcasting stations distribute it, and the user (audience, reader, viewer, etc.) finally consume it. This situation will dramatically change in the future. Triggered by the widespread availability of digital recording devices as well as display and rendering devices makes the end-user the largest content producer and consumer of the future. Besides sharing this content, the end user is also looking for new ways to participate in networked A/V systems. This opens the way for a new kind of networked multimedia applications where the end-users will strongly participate in the production of audiovisual media and as a consequence professional content will merge with user-produced content.
This project is about the citizen itself becoming the major media producer and distributor, and about exploiting this media created by different citizen at different moments of time to generate a co-created CITIZEN MEDIA application. In other words such an application is not a static framework, but is a dynamically evolving application that is continuously adapted whenever users contribute their user-generated content towards the network. In other words the end-users are becoming applications developers themselves together with other end-users. This anticipates on the fact that society is shifting from mainstream markets to individual and fragmented tastes where citizens evolve from a passive media consumer of mainstream content towards an active role in the media chain.
Similar to the explosion of textual content in the Internet 10 years ago, we will soon observe a dramatic increase of netbased audiovisual material that has been produced by the users themselves. The growing video-blogging scene and the formation of small video-based peer-to-peer networks (darknets) are already indicating that a whole series of novel applications and services will emerge. Especially in the range of big cities audiovisual information for nearly all concerns of public and private life will be available. The technical question we have to answer is: How can we enable end-users to produce and publish their own content and to create and manage their own audiovisual networks for their specific areas of interest? This means that we need user-friendly authoring tools and interfaces for end-users that allow for the production, annotation, uploading, voting, self-controlled monitoring and searching of user-maintained audiovisual networks.
Examples are of a CITIZEN MEDIA applications could be for instance a city guide. Such an application connects, organises and visualizes all city relevant information based on user-generated content and provides seamless access via navigable interfaces for home based and nomadic users. In the far future we believe that geoinformation, 3D models, multimedia information and cultural information will be combined to realize a virtual city, which is living in the net each time user upload new user-generated content. The real and the virtual city will superimpose and enforce each other to open new ways navigation and communication in urban environments. Users will be enabled to upload their own audiovisual content (text, images, graphics, sound, videos, 3D models, etc.) and by this means participate in updating the information and improving the resolution and richness of the database. In consequence the system must be able to handle professional and user produced content and care for the consistency and correctness of the database. Since a city guide is different for each city, the CITIZEN MEDIA application has to be sufficiently flexible and adaptable to tune towards local needs of different communities.
More elaborate examples of CITIZEN MEDIA applications involve novel forms of user communication and collaboration addressing and supporting anything that happens in a community and which is of some public interest. Community events range from cultural programmes (music, theatre, movie, etc.), sports, competitions and elections to fairs and games. Of special importance in the context of CITIZEN MEDIA is the live character of events and its media supported staging by the citizens themselves. Such user-centred audiovisual networks will be used to develop and stage novel forms of community events, were people at home and in the streets can participate, cooperate and communicate driving social innovation. The realisation of such events takes not only the technical convergence of broadcast, telecom, mobile and IP into account, but also the convergence of different media genres and formats like TV broadcasting, games, chats, information, surfing, and mobile navigation.
CITIZEN MEDIA applications are first of all for the citizens themselves but targets also content producers, game and service developers, public administrations, service providers and equipments manufacturers who will be able use the open architecture of CITIZEN MEDIA to implement new media services and entertainment formats, compatible with common devices, interfaces and net infrastructures.
With technology that enables users to build, maintain and destruct their own networked audiovisual systems, the whole value chain of media production, distribution and consumption will potentially change and modify the role of stakeholders in the classical value chain for content delivery.
The challenge is to make an appealing end-to-end network application or user experience based on the user-generated content that will inspire more people to produce content and extend the networked application. More people will voluntarily participate in this process of co-creating the application if it brings an added value to them or if they feel strongly involved with the other users contributing their content in case they share the same interest, empathy, background, etc. Hence the networked application should be able to be adapted and tailored towards different and diverse communities reflecting the shift in society from mainstream markets to individual and fragmented tastes.
CITIZEN MEDIA Open Reference Architecture
CITIZEN MEDIA aims to enable all users to co-create networked applications based on user-generated content. No open and flexible A/V systems allow this today because they are all designed for media production and distribution of professional content from the content provider up to the passive content consumer. To this end, new services, systems, infrastructure, technology and architectures are developed to take into account the bi-directional flow of content by the user-generated content. The system has to be open to any third party that wants to deploy a CITIZEN MEDIA application, to any user at any location with any device to consume, author and publish his own content towards a networked A/V system.
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CITIZEN MEDIA Open Reference Architecture enables to handle user-generated media recorded by different users at different times, to create a novel networked application or experience each time a user uploads new content. The underlying infrastructure hides the complexity of content handling for the end user by supporting trans-coding of formats, customisation and mixing of personal and private content. The technology required to generate the networked application is based on advanced content processing for media annotation, search, retrieval, rendering, visualisation and profiling/ranking. Also new technology for collaborative communication is envisaged as well as easy and multimodal user interfaces. To build successful applications that assure strong user involvement to co-create the application by uploading their user-generated content, user-centric design methods are used. End-to-end service delivery, network and operational scalability are considered over converged broadcast and IP communication networks, over mobile and fixed access networks to heterogeneous terminals in and outside the home.
The infrastructure consists at server side of an open software based platform termed the CITIZEN MEDIA Service framework into which technology components can be plugged into for advanced content processing for media annotation, search, retrieval, rendering, visualisation and profiling/ranking. It is these technology components that enable to create co-create an appealing networked application with multiple users from all user-generated content instead of being a passive framework for sharing media. Also new technology for collaborative communication is envisaged as well as easy and multimodal user interfaces.
CITIZEN MEDIA Open Reference Architecture anticipates on the explosion of user-generated as well as other digital multimedia content over heterogeneous IP networks that are becoming the common way for content distribution between users. While the Internet today is static oriented it is not suited for CITIZEN MEDIA applications when considering content delivery due to limited streaming capability and content presentation. To empower the user to share his user-generated media, a more dynamic view is required comprising end-user editing of content, efficient distribution and efficient access (content search, content retrieval). For CITIZEN MEDIA applications, the content itself and the network transporting the content, can not be seen as separate and independent since the user interacts with content in a much more complex environment as user-generated content creates bidirectional data transport. As a consequence, the network provider is no longer able to predict the volume of the data (bitrate, data format) over his network and hence design and scale his network for optimised network performance.
The CITIZEN MEDIA Open Reference Architecture is an open and shared infrastructure and offers a common architectural reference to be used by multiple CITIZEN MEDIA applications, infrastructure elements and technology components within the project. It assumes the possible future deployment of open, shared, seamless and non-discriminatory service infrastructures, encompassing public access and private home networks as well as interoperable terminals and middleware, that are expected to enable a myriad CITIZEN MEDIA applications for various local communities fully open to customer choice and supplier imagination.
Because such networked applications must be tuned towards a community to assure strong user involvement, an open flexible and scalable networked application framework architecture is required that supports multiple applications. Such a framework consists of re-usable technology components that can be deployed by a number of networked applications. The application framework will accelerate the introduction of new value-added network applications targeting different and diverse communities. The technological components of the framework must support fast and scalable multimedia data handling of user-generated A/V data arriving in different formats from any users as well as real time multimedia data processing to compile a co-created networked application. The latter demands advanced and complex functionality ranging from format conversion, content annotation, storage, content search and retrieval, etc. based on diverse technologies that must be integrated together to deliver a new user experience towards the user.
