The MediaVerse project’s main vision is to allow professional and amateur creators to upload their content to a decentralized platform that reaches across Europe, so they can be fully in control of their own content. To keep this undertaking more practical, the capabilities of the platform and technology need to be tested in real-world scenarios. Therefore, three use cases have been developed.
Click here to learn more about our other use cases:
Use Case 2: MediaVerse enables 360° Experiences with Social Perspective
Use Case 3: Exploring the Creation of Deepfakes with MediaVerse
Use Case 1
In this video, Rahel Luder and Florian Maillard, Project Coordinators at SWISS TXT, explain MediaVerse’s Citizen Journalism Use Case and RACU Workflow for automatic subtitling.
Becoming Citizen Journalist with MediaVerse
You’re at a political rally. Suddenly, someone starts throwing eggs at the head of state as part of their political agenda. You lift your phone just in time and end up being one of the few people, if not the only one, to catch the moment in a video. You upload it via social media, and the rest of the world can now engage with your piece of relevant content, perhaps it is even picked up by popular news outlets. Congrats, you are now a Citizen Journalist.
Since the rise of social media, websites and blogs, people have been able to directly share pictures, videos, and information from a news-worthy event or location that they happen to be at. People living in politically unstable countries, where print and broadcast are controlled by the government, can use the internet for sharing footage and information about trouble spots worldwide. This shows: Even if they are not professional journalists, citizens can do journalistic work, provide an important service and become ‘Citizen Journalists’. Anyone can be a reporter, almost anywhere in the world.
Aware of the fact that Citizen Journalism is highly participatory and can be extremely effective, in MediaVerse’s Use Case 1, SwissTXT is creating a Citizen Journalism (CJ) app, a new and innovative form of media production. With the help of the app, users can create video content that can then be uploaded to the MediaVerse platform. As the CJ app is developed and tested in Switzerland, the target users, so far, are mainly Swiss content creators and (citizen) journalists. Accordingly, the app’s content languages are Swiss languages (German, French, Italian, Romansh), and English.
So, you filmed someone egging the Prime Minister with your CJ app, maybe even livestreamed it via a corresponding YouTube channel, as is also possible with the app. Or you filmed the hot events with your phone camera and then uploaded the pre-recorded, (perhaps also pre-edited) footage to the CJ app, and even already used its function for automatic subtitling – now what?
You could also show people the ‘yolky’ incident in a 360° environment. DW and Vragments further support this Use Case by supplying templates for creating Immersive Journalism experiences in the mobile version of FADER, the MediaVerse tool for authoring 360° video. This way, even (Citizen) Journalists with little to no experience in Immersive Journalism can easily create XR experiences with the CJ app.
Wondering where to put your content, how to further enhance it? You can head right over to the MediaVerse platform, upload your footage, and find many additional tools and functions for it, such as creating more immersive stories, using AI for fact-checking or subtitling. Regarding the latter, the advantage of the platform over the CJ app is that with MediaVerse you can edit the automatically generated subtitles, which can be especially important for professional journalists who want to reuse your (citizen) journalistic recordings. After all, it is possible that content shared on MediaVerse will be picked up and repurposed by publishers such as the broadcasters DW or SwissInfo who are already partners of this Use Case.
And you, the breaking news Citizen Journalist, don’t have to worry about the rights to your footage: MediaVerse takes care of everything and helps you make your own money as a CJ, since you can simply choose the license you want on the platform.
