Active Video

The Consortium

The objective of creating access will be achieved in close collaboration between archives, academic institutions and ICT developers that form the consortium. The archives will supply their digital content; the academic institutions are the link to end-users and play an important role in defining the selection frame and in delivering the necessary context information. The ICT developers will be responsible to supply the technology needed.

Core Consortium Eleven archives are represented in the core consortium; Broadcast archives (BBC-UK, DR-Denmark, DW-Germany, ORF-Austria, RTBF-Belgium, TVC-Spain) as well as National Archives (SLBA-Sweden, SV-Netherlands, NAVA-Hungary, NTUA-Greece, IL-Italy).

Three archives have joined since the start of the projects and are associate partners:
- INA France
- VRT Belgium
- Moving Image Communications - United Kingdom

Added up, their collections comprise of over five million hours of audio and video material from 1890 to now and represent a major part of Europe’s audiovisual heritage. This unique content covers all major European languages, subjects and cultures. As outlined above Video Active will focus on certain content themes that reflect the cultural and historical similarities and differences of television from across the European Union.

Noterik Multimedia is specialised in web applications dealing with streaming media. Clients of Noterik include European broadcasters, the European Commission and national research and educational networks. Noterik has built the BIRTH portal (www.birth-of-tv.org) and will be the major technical partner of Video Active.

The second technical partner is the National Technical University of Athens. It has responsibility for coordination of the semantic interoperability work package. Apart from participating in several FP5 projects, NTUA is one of the leading participants of the W3C working group “Multimedia Annotation on the Semantic Web”. Their leading expertise is this field is highly recognised.

Two world-renown departments in the field of media history compliment the Video Active consortium. The faculties are headed by leading academics Prof. Dr. Sonja de Leeuw of Utrecht University and Prof. John Ellis of Royal Holloway University of London. In particular, they both have organised workshops, conferences and collaborative research projects involving participation across Europe, demonstrating their strong commitment to an international and multicultural approach to media studies..

The partners in Video Active have been chosen for their strengths in their particular fields of expertise. The combination of major content providers, technical experts and senior academic professionals gives the consortium a well- formed team.
The core partners:

• Utrecht University, NL (coordinator)
• British Broadcasting Corporation, UK
• Danish Broadcasting Corporation, DK
• Deutsche Welle, DE
• National Audiovisual Archive, HU
• Istituto Luce, IT
• National Technical University of Athens, GR
• Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, NL
• Noterik Multimedia, NL
• Österreichischer Rundfunk, AT
• Radio-Télévision Belge de la Communauté Française, BE
• Royal Holloway, University of London, UK
• Swedish Audiovisual Archive, SE
• Televisio de Catalunya, ES

Description of video

The term video (from Latin: "I see") commonly refers to several storage formats for moving eye pictures: digital video formats, including DVD, QuickTime, and MPEG-4; and analog videotapes, including VHS and Betamax. Video can be recorded and transmitted in various physical media: in magnetic tape when recorded as PAL or NTSC electric signals by video cameras, or in MPEG-4 or DV digital media when recorded by digital cameras.

Quality of video essentially depends on the capturing method and storage used. Digital television (DTV) is a relatively recent format with higher quality than earlier television formats and has become a standard for television video. (See List of digital television deployments by country.)

3D-video, digital video in three dimensions, premiered at the end of 20th century. Six or eight cameras with realtime depth measurement are typically used to capture 3D-video streams. The format of 3D-video is fixed in MPEG-4 Part 16 Animation Framework eXtension (AFX).

In the UK, Australia, The Netherlands, Finland, Hungary and New Zealand, the term video is often used informally to refer to both Videocassette recorders and video cassettes; the meaning is normally clear from the context.