NETIA Supports CineCast Innovative Platform for Connecting French Film Heritage With Social Networks

CLARET, France - December 10, 2010 - NETIA today announced that its R&D team is leading the CINECAST project intended to promote France's film heritage, facilitate its discovery and contributions to it by the public, and explore new cultural practices. As the French government focuses on the digitization of educational media, the CINECAST platform will develop a suite of generic and innovative tools aimed at all content suppliers of the digital age: video-sharing sites, subscription program packages, archives, libraries; and VoD, TV, and social media sites.

"Today's video-sharing tools and social media sites provide an exciting new way for audiences to engage with media from France's rich film history," said Vincent Puig, from IRI (French Institute for Research and Innovation). "The powerful array of media and metadata management tools provided by NETIA will be vital to our success in involving the public in a richer, more dynamic experience of watching, discussing, and interacting with media."

CINECAST brings together 17 research laboratories, cultural institutions, and technology and content companies in an unprecedented consortium. The project is designed to move audiences toward film-focused social media and on video-sharing sites, facilitate VOD broadcasting over the Web or IPTV on a pay-as-you-go or subscription basis, enable selective broadcasting in digital cinemas, and support new programs and educational and library services. Within the platform being developed, NETIA's Media Asset Management system will simplify the indexing, browsing, management, archiving, and distribution of media.

"As CINECAST industrializes the process of making digital media readily available via social networks and various Web-based portals, we can offer a range of intuitive media and metadata management tools that streamline this process," said Florent Barbare, R&D Project Manager, at NETIA. "We're very pleased to be playing a central role in this effort to educate and engage media consumers and film fans across France."

With the help of NETIA for end-to-end media management of even the most complex content distribution environments, CINECAST will be positioned to leverage the editorial and document engineering know-how of the main French film libraries and of the leading film social medium "AlloCiné", as well as automatic image analysis technologies and social engineering tools, to establish new media practices and services and to stimulate new individual and collective film experiences.

More information about NETIA and its products is available at www.netia.com

About CINECAST

The CINECAST project is a 36-month R&D project with a budget of 8 million euros. The project is jointly funded by its 17 partners out of their own capital, and by a pool of public backers within the FUI (French Interministerial Funding) program for the "competitiveness clusters", represented by CapDigital and Imaginove. Also involving the French Ministry for the Economy (General Directorate for Competitiveness / Industry / Services), Ile-de-France region, Mairie de Paris, Department of Val de Marne. Technical and institutional partners also include GlobeCast (France Telecom/Orange), Exalead, IRI, Liris/CNRS, List/CEA, Jamespot, BNF, Bibliothèque Centre Pompidou, La Cinémathèque Française, Forum des Images, INA, ALLOCINE, lesite.tv, Vodkaster.com, UniversCiné, Telecom Paris Tech.

More information is available at http://cinecast.fr