RTVE and Brainstorm participate in the EU Research and Innovation Program Horizon 2020

The Visualmedia project will enhance audience participation in programming, through the integration of content generated on social networks.

RTVE has opted to participate in Horizon 2020 (H2020), the Research and Innovation Framework Program of the European Union for the period 2014-2020. It will do so through Visualmedia, a project that will integrate social media and broadcast technologies and allow for greater audience participation in live programming.

In a global scenario in which audiovisual media are in full evolution and in which there are multiple platforms for the distribution of content, RTVE must combine its role as a public company with a strong technological evolution that conditions the media it uses to reach all the devices used by citizens. All of this through standards and technologies whose life cycle is increasingly shorter and that RTVE must implement to ensure, among other things, maximum social coverage.

Aware of the importance of participation in innovation projects whose results will translate, in the medium term, into products or services that offer improvements clearly perceived by citizens, the Corporate General Management of RTVE has considered participation in European innovation projects together with other relevant agents of the audiovisual industry to be strategic.

In this sense, twelve European entities, including the Spanish company Brainstorm Multimedia, the Institut für Rundfunktechnik (research center for German, Swiss and Austrian public broadcasters), Bayerischer Rundfunk (Bavarian public radio and television), the University of Surrey in the United Kingdom and RTVE itself, prepared and presented the project Immersive and Interactive Real Time 3D Social Media Graphics Environments for the Broadcast to the ICT 2015 Call of Horizon 2020 Industry known as Visualmedia, with the objective of improving and enhancing the integration of social media technologies in broadcast technology environments, to facilitate direct audience participation in live programming.

The Visualmedia project aims to go beyond the current state of technology by integrating content generated through social networks in real time with the generation of 3D graphics. All this through innovative interaction and advanced visualization systems, in order to create added value for the audience and for the sector.
Once the proposals received have been evaluated, the European Commission has proposed financing the aforementioned project. It is a relevant fact because for a proposal to receive funding it is not enough for it to exceed the minimum requirements for each award criterion or the global threshold, but it must be excellent in all aspects evaluated. To this we must add that the level of competition of the proposals presented has been very high.