With a total budget of almost one million Euro funded by the European Union, the MediaMixer project has been launched. In November 2012, representatives from eight expert organizations from seven different European countries met to launch an eighteen months support action project focused on online MEDIA fragments under the name of MediaMixer. The overall aim of the project is on setting up and sustaining a community of video producers, hosters, and redistributors who will be supported in the adoption of semantic multimedia technology in their systems and workflows to build a European market for media fragment re-purposing and re-sale. MediaMixer will focus on ways to address potentially limiting factors in the current market, simplifying aspects of content access, provision, remixing and repurposing, and tackling aspects potentially obstructive to obtaining rights for use, primarily of benefit to the established media industry, but in a way that also encourages wider access outside mainstream channels, such as in User Generated Content (UGC) portals and newer entrants monetising  media production and consumption.

MediaMixer is driven in its consortium by a group of leading research organisations in the area of semantic multimedia. This area is focused on capturing the high level (conceptual) meaning of media assets and their parts (fragments), and hence enabling software and systems to more automatically and meaningfully process and handle media workflows such as analysis, annotation, storage & retrieval, rights management and re-use (including support for re-lease or re-sale) of those assets and their fragments. MediaMixer is led by the STI International Consulting and Research GmbH, based in Vienna, Austria, a spin-off company from the Semantic Technology Institute International association, providing commercial services in the domains of event management, training, and R&D. The consortium consists of the Centre for Research and Technology Hellas – Informatics and Telematics Institute (CERTH-ITI), a non-profit organisation under the auspices of the General Secretarial of Research and Technology of Greece (GSRT), located in Thessaloniki, Greece; the EURECOM, a dynamic graduate school and research centre in communications systems in Sophia Antipolis, France; Condat AG is a medium sized company located in the centre of Berlin, Germany developing and integrating innovative solutions for leading European companies; the Jožef Stefan Institute (JSI), the central research institution for natural sciences in Slovenia; Acuity Unlimited whose technical services business is a leading open source contributor to the Fedora Commons media asset repository software, based in London, UK; Citizenside who provides a platform for user-sourced video of actual events of interest to current affairs called the “Reporter Kit” to collect, fact check, and publish news-related user-generated content based in Paris, France;  as well as the Universitat de Lleida, one of the pioneers in the application of semantic technologies to copyright management, based in Lleida, Spain. The core partners with semantic multimedia experience (annotation, analysis, search, fragments) are STI International, EURECOM, CERTH-ITI and CONDAT as well as Acuity Unlimited and UdL in the area of semantic digital rights technology.

Through a mix of online portal and collaborative events there will be a two way communication process between research and industry to overcome the prior barriers to uptake and bring an awareness to the potential of the technology among the industry.