STADIEM (STArtup Driven Innovation in European Media) became the first pan-European programme to accelerate digital transformation in the European media sector by allowing promising start-ups and media players to innovate together. Selected start-ups got access to coaching, funding and the project partners’ extensive network. The impact of such a programme cannot be underestimated. During the project, the income of participating start-ups increased on average by 25% and three start-ups have entered into commercial partnerships with VRT alone, which was coordinating partner for STADIEM and contributed one of the Hubs with their in-house accelerator VRT Sandbox.

Innovative start-ups for a strong European media sector 

Start-ups need to be able to scale up in order to be successful in the long run. An international strategy and access to the market are crucial here. However, the European media sector is fragmented by cultural, legal and linguistic borders and relatively small media players. As a result, start-ups with growth ambitions often focus on the more attractive US and Asian markets, leading to a loss of talent and intellectual property to global competitors. This is where STADIEM makes a difference: its phased accelerator programme allows start-ups to collaborate smoothly with the European media sector. In turn, the participating media companies are exposed to disrupting and emerging technologies. 

“With STADIEM’s unique growth program, we were able to provide Flemish start-ups with the opportunity to align their media solutions more effectively with the European media sector, enabling them to expand internationally. Through STADIEM we could for instance introduce the Ghent-based start-up Trensition to the German market, resulting in a collaboration with the German broadcaster SWR. On the flip side, we can also discover impactful start-ups that address our technological needs for VRT.”

Mathias Teuwen, Scale-up coordinator STADIEM

As many as 250 start-ups from 26 different European countries applied for the project. 81 of the most promising start-ups were selected to participate in the growth programme. This led to 40 collaborations with 32 media players from 12 European countries. Those collaborations focused on challenges such as disinformation, content creation and AI-driven solutions. 

Accelerating digital transformation, business growth and funding 

STADIEM accelerates digital transformation within European media organisations. Out of the ten start-ups that completed the full programme, nine succeeded to establish a long-term commercial partnership with their media partner. The other start-up entered a partnership with another media partner a few weeks after the programme ended. 

For instance, three startups successfully collaborated with VRT: Norwegian start-up Web64, Dutch start-up Smartocto and Flemish start-up Tinkerlist. These new collaborations enable VRT’s Radio2 to create local news faster, VRT’s Sporza to get inisghts based on real-time interactions on their website and VRT NWS to direct live shows with an automated script platform. 

“Before STADIEM, we needed two people to edit short TV news, which took 30 to 45 minutes. With the amazing results we achieved with start-up Television.AI, we only need one editor. This one person got the job done in 15-20 minutes.”

Willy Lamm, Project engineer at RBB 

STADIEM accelerates the business development of participating start-ups. On average, STADIEM connected each start-up to thirteen interested media players. The startups’ ‘ARR’ or annual recurring income increased by 25% on average during their participation in STADIEM.  

“Before we entered STADIEM, our planned turnover was 250,000 euros. After our participation in STADIEM and our cooperation with VRT, Roularta and NOZ, we are reaching 500,000 euros, mainly with our newly developed solution. In addition, we recently received another offer of 200,000 euros to triple our expected revenue.”

Andrey Esaulov, Founder of BotTalk 

Finally, STADIEM accelerates investments and acquisitions in the start-up ecosystem. A crucial moment for a start-up is achieving an exit through an investor or via acquisition, a milestone that only a few achieve. According to data from the State of European Tech 22 report, an exit in Europe takes seven to eight years on average, with only 1-3% of startups achieving it. STADIEM offers start-ups the chance to present themselves at international events from Helsinki to Milan, giving them a platform to connect with both media players (corporate buyers) and private investors. After three years of STADIEM, four participating start-ups achieved a successful exit, while five other start-ups successfully raised capital in funding rounds. 

A European wide collaboration 

Thanks to the laudatory feedback from the European Commission and its demonstrated impact for the European media sector, VRT, together with its partners, is exploring a new edition in 2024. In addition, start-ups with innovative ideas and technologies, from AI to virtual productions, can always turn to VRT Sandbox. 

“STADIEM built the first pan-European accelerator for the media sector by bringing together four leading media accelerators in Europe – VRT Sandbox, NMA.vc from Germany, Media City Bergen from Norway and Storytek from Estonia – and leveraging on the communities of F6S, Martel Innovate and EBU. This ensured the synergy and exchange of expertise between the hubs and partners, enabling promising start-ups and solutions to be selected for the programme. Participating start-ups gained direct access to European markets and media companies, as well as support from top experts from all corners of Europe.”

Wim Vanobberghen, Project Coordinator of STADIEM

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One opportunity provided by STADIEM there this year was a dedicated pod for the whole 4-day duration of IBC, where the STADIEM innovators could make appointments with corporates and investors and show their demos. While scale-ups were generating their business leads, the STADIEM hubs and partners further connected at the pod with interested visitors coming from all corners of Europe and the USA to discover the first European accelerator program for media. Questions related to understanding the particular mechanism of the program, which sets it apart from other accelerator programs, and to the impact the supported pilot solutions had on the corporates and the sector. The answers to these questions can be found in the new STADIEM booklet, which was given to each visitor and can be downloaded here as well. 

The EBU stage in the same area, instead, served as the venue for a Scale-up Showcase Event – held in the afternoon of 15th September – which revolved around pitches of STADIEM pilots’ solutions einbliq.io, Television.AI, Scriptix, and Limecraft, addressing an audience of media corporates, other innovators and investors.

The first two pitches focused on solutions around subtitling and translating. Limecraft’s Maarten Verwaest described how the automatic subtitling for short form content solution – that was enhanced via STADIEM – will allow broadcasters to gain important cost and efficiency benefits in the process of subtitling. Frans Olsthoorn of Scriptix, instead, highlighted that by making their solution’s speech recognition models adaptable by customers, 15% more accurate results are achieved on that level, greatly reducing the time spent on making corrections to transcripts and/or subtitles.

The third pitch, by Sebastian Siepe and Ralf Neudel of einbliq.io, testified how their solution enables audience researchers to get a detailed understanding of linear tv viewers and makes real-time actions, known from online services, possible for linear TV broadcasting. On top of that, einbliq.io developed a data foundation to reduce the overall energy use for content distribution in a combined perspective on broadcast and streaming.

Finally, Olcay Buyan illustrated how Television.AI’s solution makes news video production for editorial rooms less costly, less time-consuming and more bandwidth- oriented (increasing the number of videos produced in an hour) by processing written news stories and video footage via AI models and suggesting editing via generative AI.

After this interesting showcase, STADIEM Advisory Board Member Delphine De Wulf, an entrepreneur in the mediatech sector from Belgium, delivered a clear statement about what she considers the main importance of the STADIEM idea: “STADIEM provides, thanks to the collaboration of 4 European innovation hubs, for scale-ups over Europe, a direct and relevant access to the right people in companies, which allows you to save valuable time. Due to its program and results, STADIEM has become a label of trust and quality, which is priceless for a scale-up when scaling and looking for further growth and business opportunities”.

The event finally ended with a short official ceremony where the 4 pilots received their STADIEM award.

On the following day, STADIEM also took part in the Joint-Roundtable Event ‘Next Generation Media: a European perspective’ together with fellow ICT-44 projects Möbius, MediaVerse and COPA EUROPE and held in their shared showcase area a fruitful exchange regarding the benefits and challenges from their common European approach for Next Generation Media development. Project partners also explored the final products of each project and discussed potential alleys for further development, from their backgrounds’ perspective.

In addition to all these  activities, it’s worth mentioning that 3 STADIEM alumni scale-ups have been under major spotlights at IBC this year: Open Call 1’s Tinkerlist picked the event to reveal their groundbreaking Cuez platform, and On-Hertz (OC1) and Media Distillery (OC2) both brought home Best of Show awards for their outstanding solutions. – Read more here: On-Hertz LinkedIn page + Media Distillery LinkedIn page.

STADIEM’s incarnation as a EU-Funded project might be over, but its spirit will live on: stay tuned to our website and social media channels to find out what’s next, and get in touch with our hubs if you’re interested in following them in their future adventures.

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During the event, the STADIEM members highlighted how its approach as a first pan-European accelerator program dedicated to the media sector generated unique and inspiring results: a validated scale-up-to-corporate supplier program attracting the main European media industry corporates and top scale-ups in Europe (from Spain over Ireland to Sweden and Ukraine) to propose 32 common projects, resulting in 10 pilot success stories, supporting the scaling and growth process of 32 beneficiaries, and generating 4 exits, more than 10 business deals and 5 investments rounds. STADIEM proves that its approach and methodology, combined with targeted funding, leads to benefits for the European media industry, both private and public players, and hence ultimately also for the European media consumers. 

Media corporate Roularta and STADIEM pilot OC1 participant Trensition explained the fruitful approach of the STADIEM methodology for their STADIEM project and post-STADIEM collaboration: an innovation 14-months program allowing efficient scouting and matching on a European scale and guaranteeing strong involvement of the media corporate and the scale-up due to the clear requirements for targets for each phase and the qualitative expert evaluation procedure before granting and receiving funding. Finally, STADIEM highlighted future scenarios for continuing its accelerator and scale-up to corporate supplier program  to further enable the digital transformation of the European media sector.  

Exchange with members of the European Commission identified fruitful ways to support the sustainability of STADIEM and hence move scale-up driven innovation in the media sector further forward.

Come and meet our scale-ups in real life in Amsterdam, at IBC 2023, from September 15 to 18 – For any updates on STADIEM, make sure to follow us on Twitter/X and LinkedIn!

The post STADIEM Brussels Workshop: making the case for deepening scale-up driven innovation for the media sector in Europe appeared first on STADIEM.

We sat down with three of the four selected companies, to gather some of their experiences from the STADIEM process, and they talked about how the pilot and the acceleration program have helped them further develop their solutions and companies.

For takeaways of OC1 Pilot phase alumni FilmChain, we recommend checking out a previously released interview on their STADIEM journey.

“Great network”

“The program helped us dive deeper into working with large corporates and face the challenges that arise with it. STADIEM as a “certificate of quality” has helped us push Zazu’s name through several doors and get us introductions to investors and clients alike”. 

That is the verdict from the Zazu team. Zazu partnered with Roularta Media Group, creating an intuitive Social Story and Web Story builder that enables you to automatically create story content. 

When asked about the most unique aspects of the program, Zazu responds:

“STADIEM helped us with a great network into the media ecosystem throughout Europe. On top of that we really valued the expert mentoring sessions with “seasoned veterans” of the industry that gave deep insights into the working process of many different tasks”.

Events and media visibility

“It is supportive to network and get to know the industry much better.” 

The testimony from Trensition shows one of the biggest values from being part of STADIEM: being able to work closely with real companies, learning about their challenges, exchanging experiences and providing solutions. And not least, STADIEM is a door opener. 

Trensition is a platform automating trend and future research and providing detailed insights tailored to specific business contexts. In the STADIEM program they have developed a strategic analytics platform based on Roularta Media Group’s targets and also collaborated with SWR.

The recognition they got from working with these companies and being one of the four startups in the first Pilot phase, has given great sales opportunities with new customers and allowed them to speed up hiring. 

Trensition also highlights useful relationships with corporate partners, the media visibility they gained from winning the pitch competition at Future Week in Norway and the opportunity to take part in a number of events through STADIEM as some of the most important points of participating in the program.

The best is yet to come

“We created a One-Man-Band setup where the presenter is in charge of the whole studio. It takes only the presenter to make a full blown professional looking news bulletin. The presenter creates a script enriched with all media in a template, goes into the studio, presses play and the whole studio starts recording and streaming in full control of the presenters space bar.”

This is how TinkerList presents their final product, on which they collaborated with VRT NWS and DPG Media. They had been working on the idea before. Stadiem provided them with the opportunity to finalize it:

“We could develop the automator up to a scalable standard.”

STADIEM also helped the business grow, although they are convinced that the biggest effect is still to come. 

“We got a lot of interest and interesting contacts but unfortunately the media and broadcast sector is a business where decision making is rather slow.” 

80 opportunities

STADIEM has been connecting start-ups with media companies since 2020, and is now finalising its second cycle. The goal is to create a safe basis for growth, an opportunity to test needs and test ideas, and – not least – the next generation of solutions for the media.

So far, around 80 start-ups have had the opportunity to connect with media companies and take their ideas one step further.

STADIEM is supported by the #HorizonEurope program and run by four core partners of VRT, Media City Bergen / NCE Media, NMA Venture Capital GmbH, and Storytek Innovation & Venture Studio with supporting members of Martel Innovate, European Broadcasting Union (EBU), and F6S.

The program powers founders with deep knowledge of business development and scaling to the enterprise sector. It also gives access to a network of clients and corporations, up to €150 000 equity-free financing for B2B development, and go-to-market costs for building a viable enterprise-baked solution for the European and global industry clients. The program is designed in four phases with performance-based funding, with 40 start-ups starting at each cohort and four graduating with a maximum budget and final enterprise pilot in place.

Come and meet our scale-ups in real life in Amsterdam, at IBC 2023, from September 15 to 18 – For any updates on STADIEM, make sure to follow us on Twitter/X and LinkedIn!

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Let’s start from the basics: what’s your start-up/scale-up’s solution, in a nutshell?

Limecraft: In general, Limecraft offers advanced production automation solutions for media professionals, fuelled by AI and metadata handling. In one particular area, Limecraft has a significant competitive advantage and this is subtitling. As part of their digital first strategy, all broadcasters commit to provide same language subtitles on all their content pieces, also short form and other forms of non-broadcast content. Non-broadcast content is more difficult to handle, not because of the size but because of the sheer number of items and the assumed short turnaround time. By automating the process of creating subtitles, and by plugging this into the day-to-day workflow of journalists and editors, we have made it super easy to live up to their expectations.

BotTalk: BotTalk is a text-to-speech SaaS platform that creates an audio version of each web page and develops advanced AI voices. Our solution achieves a click-through rate of 10% and a listen-through rate of 75%, which increases a reader’s dwell time by 2.5 minutes. In the field of AI Voice Cloning we focus on a variety of European languages as well as dialects and enable every publisher to create their own branded voice.

Druid Learning: We future proof a company’s content database and allow companies to truly embrace whatever digital future they envision. We do this by breaking down content files and automatically assigning a unified layer of metadata to all content assets increasing the discoverability of content and eliminating the cost of large IT integrations.

What would be the impact of your STADIEM pilot on the corporate/sector level?

Limecraft: Evidence shows that all broadcasters typically create an average of 500 hours of aggregated short form content. Given that manual subtitling takes +/- 10 times the length of the clip, the latent cost for a broadcaster would be up to 100k per month. By using Limecraft, the corporate can deliver subtitles of at least the same quality, at a fraction of the cost, and within seconds after editing. As a spill over, the items’ SEO is drastically improved.

BotTalk: In collaboration with BotTalk, publishers take their first steps toward digital transformation and leverage the emerging opportunities of artificial intelligence. Our deep insights into the media landscape and a platform carefully tailored to publishers’ needs enable us to address each client’s distinct challenges. We address the three issues facing every publisher: low user engagement, canceled subscriptions, or diminishing advertising revenues. By leveraging our Custom Voices framework, we offer a significant advantage. Companies can create customized, branded voices: a strategic move that underpins the competitive advantage of our solution. This uniqueness requires more than a generic text-to-speech implementation from competitors to keep up. BotTalk offers a new way to distribute existing content by using synthesized voices to connect with users emotionally. The custom voice reinforces a publisher’s branding and promotes trust with minimal effort and cost. During the pilot phase, corporate was able to test the performance of the custom voice and could gain valuable insights regarding user acceptance of AI voices.

Druid Learning: In the pilot phase, we worked with a large Irish publisher to automatically implement a layer of metadata onto their popular book series known as “Lets Discover”. All files were in PDF, IDML and xml format. We automatically itemised all the content files, applied a unified layer of metadata onto all the assets and transformed their flat content files into a dynamic data set. On completion of the tasks, we had saved our client over 150k in integration costs and provided them with the ability to rapidly develop their own IT applications using their dynamic content. Druid Learning also provided over 90k in resource savings by automating manual filing and organisation processes.

What is the main advantage of STADIEM’s programme to you?

Limecraft: The one key benefit of having participated in the STADIEM programme is the level of exposure we got with real end users. Introducing automation involves change, change management requires a hands-on approach and multiple touch points. STADIEM enabled us to execute, whereas the risk of not pushing to the actual results would have been much more substantial.

BotTalk: The STADIEM programme afforded us the unparalleled opportunity to expand into the European landscape. Notably, the STADIEM network served as an invaluable conduit for cultivating B2B leads, significantly augmenting our business prospects. Critical to our progress, funding proved indispensable in realizing our ambition to develop proprietary voices, which wouldn’t be possible without it.

Druid Learning: Without STADIEM we would not have been able to grow or scale our product as rapidly as we have done. When Druid Learning began our journey we were a start-up with a number of trial clients, thanks to the program we have moved from being a start-up to being a scale-up, with a competitive commercial product, that is actively working with enterprise clients.

Come and meet our scale-ups in real life in Amsterdam, at IBC 2023, from September 15 to 18 – For any updates on STADIEM, make sure to follow us on Twitter/X and LinkedIn!

The post Success stories from the Open Call 2 pilots – Part 2 appeared first on STADIEM.

Let’s start from the basics: what’s your start-up/scale-up’s solution, in a nutshell?

Scriptix: At Scriptix we are on a mission to make content accessible to everybody. To that end we develop speech recognition models and related services such as machine translation. With our platform users can automatically generate subtitles and transcripts and translate them enabling them to make content better accessible to people who are deaf or hard of hearing and/or to increase engagement of their content.

einbliq.io: We help streaming providers and broadcasters to better understand and optimise their content distribution. This includes optimisation for cost, reliability, quality and energy down to the local level. Going beyond existing streaming analytics solutions, einbliq.io captures live data and actively optimises the delivery for each individual user session – with only minimal integration efforts. 

Television.AI: We empower editorial teams to be more efficient when producing news videos through our solution, by leveraging advanced Media AI capabilities. We do this by processing the written news story and video footage with our AI models and suggest the edit (along with a synthetic voice-over) using our generative AI models. This saves time, reduces the amount of people required per produced video, reduces communication overhead within the editorial teams and overall saves costs.

What would be the impact of your STADIEM pilot on the corporate/sector level?

Scriptix: Our pilot under the wings of the STADIEM program revolves around automatically training our generic speech recognition models. This means customers can customize our models themselves putting domain adaptability at the customer’s fingertips. On average this can result in 15% more accurate results with speech recognition, greatly reducing the time spent on making corrections to transcripts and/or subtitles. At the same time it solves the issue for Scriptix where prior to STADIEM our ML-engineers had to customize models manually taking up a lot of their time. 

einbliq.io: In the STADIEM pilots we looked at two selected application domains of our solution. In the first part, we enabled audience researchers to gain a detailed understanding of linear TV use, uncovering local behaviour differences. This brings data granularity and the possibility of real-time actions known from online services to that of linear TV broadcasting. Even under all competition, linear TV remains to be a key pillar for broadcasters. Our solution helps to innovate in that space. In the second part of the pilots, we focussed on sustainability aspects by capturing energy consumption along the content distribution chain for each individual user session. einbliq.io provides a crucial data foundation to reduce the overall energy use for content distribution in a combined perspective on broadcast and streaming – a major concern for media companies.

Television.AI: Our pilot is set up very similarly to a real editorial environment. From the capacity we reserved on the Cloud to the integration into our corporate partner’s infrastructure, who integrated our solution right into the editor’s work environment, Adobe Premiere Pro. The pilot shows, in a realistic environment, how we can positively impact an editorial newsroom’s bandwidth (number of videos produced per hour) and efficiency (money spent per video produced).

What is the main advantage of STADIEM’s programme to you?

Scriptix: The advantage of STADIEM’s program to Scriptix is actually threefold: exposure, funds and technological advancement. Thanks to the STADIEM program Scriptix has been able to reach a larger audience through events and socials. Additionally STADIEM grants up to 150k in equity-free funding, which enabled Scriptix to develop a brand new feature that will help our customers and ourselves at the same time.

einbliq.io: Convincing large media companies to step into pilots with start-ups is a challenging process for both sides. Decision and sales cycles for B2B solutions are long, especially when the solution is to be trialled in business-critical areas. STADIEM really helped to create the trust and patience while bridging the delicate gap in pilot funding. We had excellent opportunities to present our approach and the pilot in front of other media companies from and around the STADIEM network.

Television.AI: We noticed two areas of impact: first, the funding allowed us to think some parts of the project broader. For us this meant being able to spend more money training models, allow more experimentation and offer more usage capacity to our STADIEM corporate partner and potential customers who try our system for the first time. Second, we were able to make great connections through the STADIEM events and other networking events (like NAB, IBC, Future Week, etc.).

Stay tuned for part 2 – Follow us on Twitter/X and LinkedIn for updates and come and meet our scale-ups in Amsterdam, at IBC 2023, from September 15 to 18!

The post Success stories from the Open Call 2 pilots – Part 1 appeared first on STADIEM.

Now in its sixth year, the annual Future Week is a four-day festival dedicated to media tech, innovation management, news desk innovations, and future business models. Drawing in hundreds of participants from various industries, the event serves as a hub for inspiration, knowledge-sharing, discussions, and networking opportunities. Media City Bergen has designed the festival to  ensure a vibrant atmosphere where the latest developments in communication, media production, and transformative technologies are showcased. Among the participants, scale-ups such as Scriptix, Druid learning, Limecraft, Television.AI, and BotTalk took the spotlight.

During the MCB Future Week, these scale-ups were not only given the opportunity to present their solutions on stage at the Media tech and trends conference, but they also actively engaged in networking events, securing valuable leads with media corporates.

Among the notable individuals who participated in Future Week were Frans Olsthoorn, CEO of Scriptix; Niamh Faller, CEO and Founder of Druid learning; Maarten Verwaest, CEO of Limecraft; Olcay Buyan, Managing Director and Founder of Television.AI; and Dr. Andrey Esaulov, Founder and CEO of BotTalk.

The presence of these innovative scale-ups further highlighted the collaborative and forward-thinking nature of Media City Bergen’s Future Week, setting the stage for future collaboration and synergies in the media tech industry.

The scale-ups in the spotlight

Curious about the scale-ups and their innnovative solutions? Let’s delve into a brief introduction to their co-creation projects supported by STADIEM:

Scriptix‘s speech recognition ecosystem enables customers to generate transcripts and subtitles automatically both in batch and real-time in 13 languages. Their models can be customized to better fit specific verticals or use cases and do not store any customer data unless customers want it to.

Druid learning provides publishers with a platform that facilitates the automatic micro categorisation of all digital assets. The platform automates the indexing of digital content files into component digital assets, increasing discoverability of content and reducing the need for manual or costly processes.

Limecraft offers online collaborative workspaces for the creative industry. VRT is a public broadcaster and like all other public broadcasters and commercial broadcasters, there is a growing demand for subtitling in Dutch or other languages, and different formats for various video-on-demand platforms. Limecraft has a unique piece of software that automates the steps of segmenting and aligning subtitles. In the development phase of the STADIEM project, Limecraft optimises the Natural Language Processing (NLP), to automatically cut the transcript into perfectly segmented and timed subtitles according to the style guide of VRT. Secondly, Limecraft integrates the transcription and subtitling tools into the pre-existing editing environment, so as to avoid switching between different apps and to create a consistent workspace. By optimising the quality of the output of artificial intelligence, and by reducing the clutter of apps, users will drastically reduce the workload and the turnaround time.

Television.AI helps you automate your news video production by analysing raw video footage, creating a spoken voice-over and automatically predicting the required edit to aligning your news story’s voice-over and video footage ready for your editorial team to review and publish.

BotTalk is a SaaS text-to-speech platform that enables publishers to create an audio version of their articles using an AI voice. This creates another distribution channel and revenue stream and significantly increases reader engagement. In addition, BotTalk allows any company to create its own voice using voice cloning technology. The custom voice promotes branding, user trust, and emotional connection to the company.

STADIEM has more in store for you from here until September – Stay tuned to our website and social media to find out more!

The post Our Scale-ups Showcase Innovative Solutions at Media City Bergen’s Future Week appeared first on STADIEM.

The Pilot phase showcasing journey brought STADIEM to the MCO MediaTech Festival in Odense (Denmark) from 31 May to 1 June. The annual festival is a two-day media tech conference that offers a dynamic blend of inspiration, knowledge-sharing, discussions, and networking opportunities, organised by Media City Odense. On stage, they showcase the latest advancements in communication, marketing, media production, and transformative technologies, including scale-ups from the STADIEM Pilot phase; einbliq.io and BotTalk.

At the MCO MediaTech Festival, the start-ups were invited to present their solution at a STADIEM pitching event on stage. They also participated in the MCO Speed Dating Event, where they got quality networking and feedback from European media corporates and investors.

Joining from BotTalk was their Founder and CEO, Dr. Andrey Esaulov. Andrey holds a PhD in Linguistics, previously worked as Head of Prototyping for meinestadt.de (Alex Springer) for 6 years and was a software architect. einbliq.io was represented by their co-founder and CEO, Ralf Neudel. Previously, Ralf was Strategic Technologist for the Digital TV Group UK and coordinated the collaborative research activities of IRT – the former research and innovation centre of the public TV and radio broadcasters in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

Also on stage for the pitching event to give the audience a short introduction to the STADIEM program was Media City Bergen (represented by Helge O. Svela). 

The scale-ups in the spotlight

Curious about the scale-ups and their innnovative solutions? Let’s delve into a brief introduction to their co-creation projects supported by STADIEM:

einbliq.io is an analytics and automation platform dedicated to making the operation of streaming services greener, cheaper, and better. With the support of STADIEM and the European Commission, einbliq.io is running public pilots with the French-German broadcaster ARTE as well as with rbb, the regional public broadcaster for Berlin/Brandenburg and member of ARD. The aim of the pilots is to more accurately model and measure the energy consumption of content distribution and to identify potential for reduction.

BotTalk is a SaaS text-to-speech platform that enables publishers to create an audio version of their articles using an AI voice. This creates another distribution channel and revenue stream and significantly increases reader engagement. In addition, BotTalk allows any company to create its own voice using voice cloning technology. The custom voice promotes branding, user trust, and emotional connection to the company.

STADIEM has more in store for you from here until September – Stay tuned to our website and social media to find out more!

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The Production Technology Seminar and the STADIEM Side Event

We kicked off our year in Geneva with this hybrid event, counting over 250 attendees (136 of which on site), at an edition that focused on technologies and trends that are redefining the nature and quality of modern media experiences, and the tools and workflows to produce them. As networking and on-site demonstrations are integral part of PTS, we organised a side event reception at the end of the first day (January 24), for all registered attendees. The reception served first of all as a great platform to present STADIEM and its relevance in Europe as the first pan-European accelerator dedicated to the media sector – the achievements so far in terms of projects and impact for corporates and scale-ups and its start-up-to-corporate supplier program – engaging the audience via the distribution of a “STADIEM Facts” postcard linking to a survey, to collect their take and feedback on our work. This was followed by a networking space, for a further discussion opportunity.

Showcasing the STADIEM innovators at the Data Technology Seminar

Taking place just a few months after (21-23 March), the Data Technology Seminar saw us returning to Switzerland with three of our Open Call 2 scale-ups – Limecraft, Media Distillery and BotTalk – presenting their solutions and the work conducted with their respective corporate partners in the exhibition area of the event. The DTS is a regular meeting point for data technology professionals in media, discussing any data-related specificity in the field, from metadata to AI; now also held in hybrid format, it attracted 221 attendees, with an on-site presence of 96. 

STADIEM has more in store for you from here until September – Stay tuned to our website and social media to find out more!

The post STADIEM Highlights from EBU’s Production Technology and Data Technology Seminars appeared first on STADIEM.

Our tour of events started from the far North, in Tallinn, Estonia, at the renowned Latitude59, with a two-fold participation to the event, gathering over 50 participants: we started out with the Pitching Event – where STADIEM innovators Druid Learning, Wantent and BotTalk took the Community Stage, introducing the audience to their media solutions – followed immediately after by STADIEM’s own side event, which saw our hubs VRT Sandbox (represented by founder and media specialist Peter De Paepe) and Media City Bergen (represented by Marianne Fjellhaug) explain to investors, corporates and start-ups how and what STADIEM contributes to the European media sector.

The scale-ups on stage

Let’s learn a little more about the protagonists of the Latitude59’s Pilot Event, and their focus areas:

Druid Learning (Monetization focus area) – A white-label educational content e-commerce platform designed with inclusiveness in mind, allowing publishers to control, manage and distribute their digital content directly to their end users. They found invaluable partners in CJ Fallon Irish Educational Publisher, which is looking into improving and optimising content production through automation processes. Druid Learning is part of the 6 selected scale-ups that are part of the currently running Open Call 2 Pilot phase.

BotTalk (Content creation & distribution focus area) – BotTalk’s technology focuses on text-to-speech, allowing publishing houses with an average output of 200 news articles a day to create 8 to 30 hours of audio daily from it. Funke, NOZ, t-online, VRT, Mediafin and Roularta all partnered-up with BotTalk, leading to piloting their solution for content creating. BotTalk is also among the OC2 Pilot phase scale-ups.

Wantent (Content creation & distribution focus area)  – Wantent is a unique AI-based platform that identifies consumer reactions to video content, applying ML technologies. The scale-up was also part of the STADIEM OC 2 selection, enrolled in the programme until its Develop phase, finding a match in VRT, which sought out to validate and measure impact on users in the development of a long-form tv show.

Read about all the other STADIEM Open Call 2 solutions here!

THE EVENT

We were very proud to be able to attach our event to Latitude59 – held this year from May 24 to 26 – which is known as the place to be in the start-up/scale-up ecosystem, featuring various networking opportunities, in-depth discussions with top international players, several pitching rounds for both start-ups as well as investors, and an overall chance to get together, reflect on the crazy strenuous couple of years behind us, and forge new plans for the future of media in Europe.

the next pilot events

The Pilot Events tour will continue at Media City Odense (31st May), Future Week (7th June) and IBC 2023 (15th to 18th September). Other start-ups, scale-ups, investors and media companies are welcome to join us to discover the accelerator, its program and its portfolio and meet and mingle with the STADIEM innovators. 

Stay tuned to our website and social media for upcoming news on the pilots’ developments, or subscribe to our newsletter for any updates on both OC1 and OC2 cohorts’ progress and all other STADIEM’s activities!

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