Future media Internet for large-scale CONTent experimentation (FI-CONTENT)

With over a billion users worldwide, the Internet is one of history’s great success stories and an inevitable part of our life, work and leisure. Its global, integrated communications infrastructures and service platforms underpin the fabric of the European economy and society. Yet today’s Internet was designed in the 1970s, for purposes that bear little resemblance to current and future usage scenarios. Mismatches between the original design goals and how the Internet is being used have been hampering its potential for a very long time. Many challenges in the areas of technology, business, society and governance will have to be overcome if the future development of the Internet is to sustain the networked society of tomorrow.

Future media Internet for large-scale CONTent experimentation (FI-CONTENT) is a project that will transform the perception of, and possibilities for, the next generation Internet. With inputs from 5 important content areas, spanning future uses of AV, games, Web, metadata and user generated content, demonstrating usage beyond current state of the art, we have assembled a consortium including major content providers, games companies, hardware vendors, network operators, broadcasters, research institutes and academia to propose a number of novel and inventive scenarios for new forms of content.

We are providing a framework to allow transformations of our scenarios into technical outputs, as well as project management to ensure this ambitious project succeeds in creating services and experiments. As individual members, we have extensive expertise in collaborative projects, and as a consortium we can demonstrate actual business and research needs for improvements to today’s Internet, which will drive and shape our groundbreaking work.

Usage areas

• Games & Virtual Environment
• Professionally generated content
• User Generated Content entertainment
• High end B2B services
• Edutainment & Culture

The project as a whole addresses five key areas where today’s Internet can be improved: better QoS and experience, direct Internet connectivity (a serverless world), usage beyond a purely static text/plugin/browser based approach, better tracking of content, and the ability to provide support, failover and resilience across different providers (e.g. mobile devices, crossing between countries, or moving between different access points (e.g. home to library).

The Fraunhofer FOKUS Competence Center Future Applications and Media is leader for task T3.3 - Identification of generic enablers and of specific functionalities. We will focus on various interactive media technologies developed by our research teams like e.g non-linear video (NLV), which will be embedded in the FI-CONTENT structure.

The project approach will focus on early proof of concepts to facilitate just enough technical specification to deliver requirements to the Core Platform. This will allow us to rapidly propose new scenarios and use cases, and reject them at an early stage if they prove unsuitable. Within our overall content areas, we expect a number of our scenarios to progress through to Phase 2 of the FI project, where we will demonstrate concrete prototypes, SME engagement and running code.

Project Details

Partners: 16
Total Budget: 8,3 Mio
EU funding: 5 Mio

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