ABOUT

Media production and consumption behaviours are changing in response to novel technologies and demands. Nevertheless, news coverage is a standardized activity with a well-defined workflow. In the era of internet and social media, citizens are shifting their attention to these platforms where they can access and selectmore personalized news. This is leading to the decay of regular media consumption behaviours and to the spread of misleading/fake content on social media, which is accompanied by the increasing lack of trust from users.

Crowd journalism introduces a completely new paradigm, in which citizens play an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analysing, and disseminating news and information. Citizens’ engagement in the news production process can counter the aforementioned problems. However, it remains unresolved the environment that enables streamlines communication between journalists and ordinary citizens, the selection and editing of relevant contributions, and how to compensate citizens for their contributions.

In this sense, DAVINCI crowd journalism social media Decentralized Application (DApp) proposed a blockchain-based environment for collaborative news production. It fosters the usage of user-generated content to assist in professional news production, promoting users’ engagement, satisfaction, and trust in the news produced, considering the several layers of transparency and security.

Besides providing a decentralized environment for crowdsourced live streaming, DA VINCI guarantees content ownership and yields a marketplace for audio-visual content immutable trading between participants and journalists, with an internal token ecosystem,rewarding the citizens for their participation. All information produced along the crowd journalism DApp, regarding users, generated content, and marketplace transactions are anonymized and permanently stored in the blockchain infrastructure.

The usage of the crowd journalism DApp enables the media producers to obtain high-quality coverage of breaking news, which ultimately results in higher revenue. The citizens who proceeded to cover such events can be rewarded accordingly.

DA VINCI not only offers a novel, intuitive, trustworthy, and resilient strategy to engage citizens in the professional news production to securely and reliably dynamize the media industry, as it overcomes privacy, robustness, credibility, andautonomy related issues associated with proprietary social media platforms.

GOals

The DA VINCI solution can have a significant impact on the media industry and on how citizens are allowed and expected to engage. The project main goals include:

» To create a decentralized crowd journalism framework that integrates the following features: (i) a simple to use, browser agnostic, crowd streaming app that restricts streaming to the event location minimizing fake profiles (ii) a cloud-based virtual studio to process, select, preview and edit multiple streams in real-time (iii) a democratic classifier for incoming streams using different categories and (iv) a decentralized blockchain-based video marketplace in exchange for virtual rewards for user-generated content;

» To enhance and reframe the media industry business model, as well as provide a compensation mechanism to participating citizens.

» To provide content ownership and security, anonymity and immutability of transactions between citizen users and journalists;

» To counter the spread of misinformation, resorting to geolocation, external user classification mechanisms and to the blockchain infrastructure;

» To reach a high number of stakeholders, disseminating the DA VINCI project, the TruBlo call and the Alastria blockchain infrastructure in order to foster new clients and partners relationships;

ARCHITECTURE

The DA VINCI solution modular architecture is shown bellow, containing four main modules: the live video capture; the cloud platform; the news video editor and classifier; and the news video marketplace. This figure presents the envisioned connections between modules to guarantee the flow of professional media production based on crowd-sourced content, established upon the Alastria blockchain infrastructure.

The live streams created by users will be transmitted to the Cloud platform using a standard, low latency streaming protocol. The Cloud platform is also capable of creating two distinct outputs for each video: one live stream feed for monitoring/classifying/editing purposes and another to a friendly VOD format. Since the capture tool allows the mobile devices to send videos with different encoding settings, it is also necessary to normalize all feeds to the same predefined media settings. This is a crucial step to guarantee a friendly VOD file while ensuring a good quality of experience and, as a result, it will be fulfilled by web stream processors in the Cloud platform. All VOD files are then stored in a video storage database with a unique associated fingerprint.

The live streams received in the Cloud will be relayed to both the news video classifier and the news video editor.

In the news video classifier, users should be capable of watching multiple live videos simultaneously, with the videos showing different perspectives from producers streaming in a news event. These users will rate and classify the videos taking into account different parameters, such as their perceived impact or trustiness of the video.

In the meantime, media producers (e.g. journalist, producer, director) will have access to a news video editor that provides professional video switching of live streams created on the platform. In this interface, the media producer can analyze, browse, filter and select the most relevant streams out of the ones that are displayed to them. The selected feeds can then be relayed to external broadcast channels, such as social media channels, streaming platforms, among others. Both the news video classifier and news video editor are web based and will be able to handle all the incoming live streams, process and render them in a web page with several video players.

Users will have access to a news video marketplace to browse and preview contributions from producers in VOD format. On this platform, prospective buyers should be capable of seeing the rating of the videos and purchase them, rewarding the corresponding producer with virtual tokens, handled by the blockchain. Blockchain is the backbone of this ecosystem, allowing users to buy and sell videos in a secure, decentralized and democratic fashion. The blockchain guarantees the users’ anonymity in all transactions while ensuring content ownership.