As usual, the VRT organised Media Fast Forward with the aim of bringing together the entire Flemish media, technology and innovation sector to discuss the future of media. The annual inspiration and networking festival welcomed over 1000 visitors at the new Brussels location 'The Egg'.

This year, VRT Innovation showcased 5 projects at IBC, the yearly international media, entertainment and technology conference in Amsterdam. At different stands, organised by VRT and partners, visitors were able to experience personalised and interactive radio, discover media applications in a smart city, and learn more about the technological opportunities for media accessibility. One of the stands was uniquely designed and hand-drawn by designer Anne Manteleers. View the pictures here.

From the 13th till the 17th of September, VRT Innovation is represented at the IBC event, the yearly international media, entertainment and technology conference in Amsterdam. Together with its partners, VRT Innovation showcases 5 projects that focus on delivering a more personalised and interactive media experience, and innovating together.

As part of the FLAME project, VRT worked together with partners as Disney and Martel Innovate to create a smart media infrastructure in order to experiment with new personalised, localised and interactive media applications. The project is now in its end phase and is looking for proposals from SMEs and startups for new media experiences that make use of 5G networks. 

On the 17th and 18th of June, VRT hosted a hackathon for the EBU VOX group, a member-led expert group from the Digital, Radio and Technology & Innovation departments of the European Broadcasting Union. The group includes representatives from member broadcasters who have strategic interests in the future of audio and video, with the arrival of voice-controlled digital assistants.

At the end of March, VRT Innovation and VRT NWS experimented for four weeks with VRT MyNWS, a web application that aims to bring readers news articles based on their interests. The experiment was led by VRT as part of the European CPN project. In this project, VRT Innovation helps with building software that allows media organisations to personalise their news content

France TV, the Dutch NPO, the Finnish public broadcaster, the British Broadcasting Corporation, the Rádio e Televisão de Portugal. Those are only 5 of the 15 media organisations that joined the Sandbox Hub the past year. The Sandbox Hub initiative was launched early 2018 to support collaboration and knowledge-sharing among European broadcasters and startups.

For a European project, VRT is looking for 50 startups and SMEs to solve a big data challenge. Those interested could receive up to €100K. The project, called EDI, has a €5 million fund to foster the data economy in Europe.

Starting April 8, “Breaking Europe” begins, an online programme in which journalists Rudi Vranckx and Yassine Atari visit different European cities and ask Europeans their opinion on topics like migration, the climate and youth unemployment. To allow as many young Europeans to share their opinions and at the same time support the editorial team with the processing of the material, the team of VRT Innovation built a “talking box”, a mobile booth with an innovative video captioning system.

A new project led by VRT, named NewsTAPAS, has been approved for funding by Google DNI. The project aims to address the growing need for an automated and personalised presentation of news articles. The project team exists of a unique collaboration of VRT with a multimedia publisher (Roularta), an AI start-up (ML2Grow) and imec research groups (SMIT and IDLab). The project will start on May 1st and will last one and a half year.