TV and Media Production companies around the world have a steadily growing amount of digital multimedia content to store and manage. All the different sectors of media services such as casting, location scouting, film production, advertising etc produce a vast amount of digital content in all forms (video, images, graphics, music). This digital information needs to be archived, managed, accessed and presented in an efficient way. Moreover there is a growing need for remote access and online presentation of these multimedia repositories to help media professionals in their everyday business.
In recent years a number of interesting new applications providing online media services have emerged.
Some examples include online casting services (http://www.casting.fr/, http://www.ordino.gr/), online location services (http://www.locamundo.com, http://www.locationmanagement.com/), online stock footage services (http://www.bbcmotiongallery.com/ , http://www.gettyimages.com ) etc.
However each one of these applications builds multimedia repositories using different annotation schemes and storage formats. For the purpose of describing and storing the multimedia data most commonly relational databases are used and in a few cases XML. The data model is different every time and the annotation for the multimedia content has to happen manually. For a media company to showcase one of their multimedia archives utilizing one of the above online services would be a daunting job as the annotation scheme and storage format of the company’s archives is different to the one used by the online media services.
The implementation of a common data model and technical platform for the media production repositories would make the online media services interoperable, more usable and efficient.