Help us make multimedia content more compatible

Multimedia providers and distributors are being sought by Leeds researchers, to test some of the latest technology for handling digital media such as music, games and TV.

In today’s digital world, multimedia entertainment reaches us in a huge variety of ways, whether it’s films watched on a laptop, interactive games on our mobile phones or music downloaded through the internet. As technology advances, these outlets proliferate, raising problems of compatibility and copyright protection.

Leeds is part of a multimillion European project – Axmedis – to find ways of tackling some of these problems, helping to reduce the costs of digital content production, distribution and protection.

Dr Kia Ng, director of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Scientific Research in Music explains: “At the moment it can be quite a costly and complicated procedure to format multimedia content for one outlet that was originally created for another. We are developing a framework which will adapt and process cross-media content automatically and then distribute it to whichever outlet is chosen.”

The researchers are now looking for companies to test out their software in the market place and have over 1 million euros available to fund the work.

Content producers or distributors who are part of an Axmedis network will be able to search a database of content, or save new content to the system, pick their target for distribution (mobile phone, internet, satellite, etc.) and the rest will be done automatically.

Free music internet downloads have created copyright issues in recent years and the researchers are keen to ensure their new system is able to provide easy access while protecting performance rights.

The Axmedis project is co-funded by the European Commission and involves twenty partners in the UK, Italy, Germany, France, Switzerland and Spain.