Encouraging a start-up mentality in European media

The EU-funded MediaRoad project aims to foster collaboration between researchers, content creators, broadcasters and entrepreneurs in order to encourage and enable innovation in the media sector. The project aspires to awaken a ‘start-up mentality’, reshaping the way media organizations collaborate and deploy new ideas in the market. The project aims to cover topics such as Augmented and Virtual Reality, robot journalism or 5G, and also to address future research policy priorities in the media sector.

MediaRoad draws upon existing initiatives developed by EBU members to innovate with start-ups and SMEs. VRT’s award-winning Sandbox and the BBC's Taster provide environments to experiment with new ideas and to test and scale promising concepts in operational environments (see the Live IP Project as one example). Supporting the launch of similar innovation incubators across Europe is a key goal of the project.

The MediaRoad project consortium will work closely with the creative and technology sectors to help innovative concepts mature for market deployment and formulate common recommendations for future media policies. The consortium is led by the EBU and includes some of Europe’s most prominent broadcasters (BBC, RAI, VRT and the Association of European Radios), who will work alongside leading media research institutes (IRT, EPFL and IMEC) and independent producers (CEPI TV).

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 761412.