The European audiovisual and radio sector has long led the world in its collaborative development of technology, standards and content. Due to media convergence and global competition, media organizations now face challenges from disruptive technology and business models. New policy agendas require their proactive and coordinated attention. Despite these challenges, EU media players have many advantages: they produce much of the quality content shared on social media, invest heavily in R&D, and are well placed to launch dynamic collaborative innovations. To further this substantial legacy, a consortium of public and commercial broadcasters, creative producers and research bodies now proposes to launch MediaRoad, a highly innovative coordination project with three interconnected Hubs: - The Sandbox Hub will enable media organizations to create a series of interlinked incubators, or Sandboxes, where SMEs can test and scale innovative concepts in operational environments. Each Sandbox will offer workspace, infrastructure and internal support for short periods. The Hub will create a toolkit, support Sandbox launches, and attract startups. - The Policy Hub will develop a policy vision for the whole radio and AV sector on topics such as the EU research agenda, data, 5G, security, immersive media, investment, training and regulatory issues. It will hold workshops, share updates, draft vision documents and link to other research projects. - The Network Hub will create a series of events to bring together broadcasters, researchers, content creators, technologists and entrepreneurs to inspire collaborations and share knowledge. Topics will include social media, post-convergence radio, multi-platform content, new audience measurements and robot journalism. MediaRoad will turn EU diversity into opportunities, help organizations become more competitive and ultimately benefit audiences with better content, better delivered.

MULTIDRONE aims to develop an innovative, intelligent, multi-drone platform for media production to cover outdoor events, which are typically held over wide areas (at stadium/city level). The 4-10 drone team, to be managed by the production director and crew, will have: a) increased decisional autonomy, by minimizing production crew load and interventions and b) improved robustness, security and safety mechanisms (e.g., embedded flight regulation compliance, enhanced crowd avoidance, autonomous emergency landing, communications security), enabling it to carry out its mission even against adverse conditions or crew inaction and to handle emergencies. Such robustness is particularly important, as the drone team has to operate close to crowds and may face an unexpected course of events and/or environmental hazards. Therefore, it must be contextually aware and adaptive with improved perception of crowds, individual people and other hazards. As this multi-actor system will be heterogeneous, consisting of multiple drones and the production crew, serious human-in-the-loop issues will be addressed to avoid operator overload, with the goal of maximizing shooting creativity and productivity, whilst minimizing production costs. Overall, MULTIDRONE will boost research on multiple-actor systems by proposing novel multiple-actor functionalities and performance metrics. Furthermore, the overall multidrone system will be built to serve identified end user needs. Specifically, innovative, safe and fast multidrone audiovisual shooting will provide a novel multidrone cinematographic shooting genre and new media production techniques that will have a large impact on the financially important EU broadcasting/media industry. It will boost production creativity by allowing the creation of rich/novel media output formats, improving event coverage, adapting to event dynamics and offering rapid reaction speed to unexpected events.