Public Funding for Integrated Broadcast Information Systems Limited

The preparation and processing of digital audio visual data when commercialising filmed entertainment and broadcast content involves working with significant numbers of large media files, particularly when adapting media for multiple formats, delivery mechanisms, territories and languages. The industry is moving towards workflows that are file based, necessitating the copying and transfer of digital assets amongst the many parties involved in the value chain, including studios, post production facilities, authoring houses, electronic retailers and others. Media asset management (MAM) systems have been helpful for building inventories of content, yet the detachment of assets from their associated metadata gives rise to many challenges for reliability, quality and security, and hinders commercial exploitation. This project will deliver a new, unique solution to enable digital media assets to be maintained with their associated metadata persistently, robustly and in a way that is compatible with existing workflows and systems. The solution will build on new innovative applications of UK originated digital fingerprinting and watermarking research such that asset files can be quickly and uniquely identified and tracked. An additional benefit of the approach is that it affords a level of security to prevent unauthorised access to protected data, and enables each copy of an asset file to be identified with the party to which it was supplied. The system is applicable to all aspects of commercial exploitation of film and video content, including theatrical, home entertainment and broadcast, and will be inter operable with existing databases and MAM systems.

The broadcast media industry is undergoing rapid change. 24x7 news is now commonplace, requiring newsrooms instantly to combine feeds from all around the world with their large scale media archives. Emerging technologies in phonetic audio search can find matches to any words and phrases (including names) in spoken audio, creating the potential for journalists to be alerted about breaking news and to rapidly search their archives for relevant content - without being limited to just catalogue metadata. Project MARTHA brought together from the UK a national news broadcaster, a leading media asset management (MAM) company and a pioneering phonetic audio search company to solve the challenges needed to create a prototype journalist alerting and large scale archive searching system. Innovative features of the prototype that has been developed include: - Searching feeds using spoken audio as the basis of the search, which is very novel in this industry - Using phonetic audio search - which can find names of individuals, places and companies - Real time journalist alerting, which is totally new in the broadcast industry. MARTHA provided the first demonstrated use of audio alerting technology to find news stories across multiple feeds as they happen - Application of large-scale audio search to media archives, which involved developing novel technical architectures for rapid search. The prototype alerting and archive search system was installed and evaluated by journalists. Both the archive-search and the real-time alerting functions were very well received, with all feedback being positive. The system was able to find audio and video clips that would otherwise have taken much longer. Spin-off benefits from MARTHA include the potential to apply the technology beyond news, to widen intelligent access by consumers to context relevant content, including internet-based media and democratised content.