Research group for Media, Innovation and Contemporary Technologies

SMIF - Smarter media in Flanders

About

As widely known and published in various reports, the media industry is under continuous pressure. The media landscape is changing drastically and traditional media companies are now competing with alternative business models that are operating from an international context. The major question is what will be the role of the media companies in the future and how should the business evolve?

The aim of the IWT-funded joined project Smarter Media in Flanders (SMIF) is to investigate the future models applicable in the media industry that can create sustainable growth. The consortium groups both major and minor players in the industry, such as print media companies, service providers and technology providers, while academic institutions are involved to support specific research topics.

The SMIF project allows, for the first time in the media sector, a collaboration to be created for the production, collection, processing and distributing of non-competitive content, and more specifically for the collection of sports results (WP3), a common Next Media platform for innovative reporting (WP5), distribution of video content (WP6), distribution of media documents (WP7), the monitoring of copyrighted content (WP8), and the validation of advertisements (WP9). A cloud computing service forms the underlying hard- and software architecture of these production and distribution platforms and applications.

IBBT-MICT will conduct research into current workflows and work practices in today’s print media newsrooms, in order to detect the newsrooms’ needs and requirements with regard to sports results collection (WP3) and innovative newsgathering en reporting (WP5). In addition, IBBT-MICT will also do survey research among a representative sample of Flemish potential end-users for on-demand video services. Through ‘adoption potential analysis’ (using the PSAP scale) and ‘segmentation forecasting’, MICT will study the valorisation potential of direct marketing business models for on-demand video.

Duration of the project

The project runs from 01/11/2010 - 28/02/2012.

Staff involved

  • Evelien D'heer

Clusters

  • Media Production & Distribution

Financed by

  • IWT