An EBU presentation at the Gaia-X Summit 2024 in Helsinki last month highlighted how the Trusted European Media Data Space (TEMS) project is working to modernize Europe’s media landscape.
Gaia-X is an initiative to develop a federated secure data infrastructure for Europe, allowing users to retain control over their data access and usage while facilitating the sharing of data in ways that facilitate collaboration and innovation. The EBU’s involvement in Gaia-X reflects its commitment to ensuring the media industry remains competitive, collaborative, and innovative in a digital-first world.
Lucille Verbaere, a senior project manager at the EBU who leads the media ecosystem in Gaia-X, explained how TEMS bridges the public and private sectors, aiming to enhance collaboration across what is a huge but fragmented ecosystem, comprising 200,000 media companies and one million jobs. This fragmentation, coupled with rising competition from global platforms, means there is a growing need for collaboration on how the industry uses digital, data-intensive technologies.
Eight trial projects
Verbaere, who is on the project steering board for TEMS, outlined how it brings together a round 42 partners from 12 countries, including media companies, broadcasters, content producers, news agencies, archives and technology providers. The initiative is fostering eight trial projects with goals such as streamlining the exchange of metadata, improving collaboration in content production, and supporting cross-border content distribution.
One key goal is to federate existing platforms, such as TAMIS in France (for metadata collaboration) and Drive in Germany (for news usage data exchange), demonstrating the benefits of unifying old and new systems within a decentralized framework.
During the panel discussion, she emphasized how a media data space could help secure and harmonize access to media content by generative AI systems and ensure that media companies get a fair share of the value generated. A proposed TEMS app store will become a repository of AI tools with high standards of trust and transparency, which media need for content production and distribution.
Held on November 14–15 in Helsinki, Finland, the Gaia-X Summit 2024 gathered industry leaders to discuss advancements in secure, federated data infrastructures under the theme "Empowering Global Data Spaces: Shaping Tomorrow’s Cloud Infrastructure".