FNE Innovation: Cabirya: first cross-platform search engine for European cinema
Film New Europe continues to invite initiators of innovative audiovisual projects to share their projects directly with its readers. Our guests today are Marco Moretti and Antonio Emmanouilidis, who write about Cabiriawhich is not only the title of the first spectacular epic film produced in Europe, and the most famous golden age masterpiece of Italian cinema, but also the first European film search API and the only moving image search engine.
Cabirya is co-financed by the Creative Europe – MEDIA Program from European Union.
what a challenge East Cabirya solve?
According to the latest analysis of European market trends, the pandemic has significantly increased the consumption of streaming videos. In 2020, VoD subscribers in Europe exceeded 140 million. However, the presence of European audiovisual content in the nearly 800 catalogs of VoD services available in Europe is only 20%, and its visibility on the VoD home page is on average 18% compared to 58% for American movies.
In other words, an impressive potential audience cannot easily find any European audiovisual content, unpromoted and hidden in huge, chaotic, dense and difficult to explore VoD catalogues. The only ways to access these unknown works are basic and simple search tools by title or by person.
In our view, there is no shortage of stories. There’s no shortage of good stories either. But you have to find stories. Therefore, we can say that tools are missing to find them. What is missing is the meeting point between viewers and stories, a system that can increase the visibility of EU films and at the same time act as a differentiating factor for EU VoD platforms. EU.
What is the solution ?
In 2020, Cabirya successfully applied to the Creative Europe MEDIA program to develop a proof of concept of an innovative search API (Application Program Interface) dedicated to European cinema, positioning itself as the first search API platform specializing in European audiovisual content and the only moving image search engine.
Cabirya, both as a standalone cross-platform search engine and as a service integrated into an existing VoD platform, provides the user with personalized recommendations, fast and accurate search output and an enhanced discovery experience, magnifying every scene of Europe’s great film heritage, allowing users to discover Europe in its intriguing cultural diversity and complexity.
By facilitating the search for audiovisual content, Cabirya ensures added value to the European film market enabling filmmakers, producers, distributors, broadcasters as well as national or regional archives, film institutes or similar institutions to increase visibility and worldwide distribution. of their wider audience content from a vibrant, diverse and transnational viewing community.
Cabirya, as a tool for cross-border and multilingual discovery of European cultural and cinematographic realities, promotes new approaches to audience development in the digital age. Cinephiles, video-on-demand users, informed television viewers, emigrants who can preserve their cultural identity, language students, new generations who can take part in an experience of intercultural exchange, occasional spectators, all can approach narratives hitherto unknown or abandoned.
How does Cabirya work?
Each film is segmented into meaningful scenes. Cabirya’s frame, shot and scene boundary detection technology, in addition to a cinematic model scoring of semantic and narrative relevance, enables recognition of the most significant sequences.
Every detail of a scene is revealed. Thanks to Cabirya’s deep image tagging algorithm and precise metadata generation, the user can access each movie through an almost infinite combination of keywords, such as person, object, mark, text, action , location, color, shot, emotion.
The elements of each scene are related to each other. Cabirya’s advanced mapping system links similar scenes from different movies from different countries. All elements of each scene are linked to each other to create a rich network of hyperlinks. The user can navigate the content in a very granular way and, stimulated by the similarity of the scenes, can approach films that he has probably never seen before and would not find with a common search engine.
Audiovisual works are automatically subtitled in the main European languages. Optional parallel subtitles, in the user’s original language and local language, will guide and support the user in their exploration of the rich European linguistic landscape.
Thanks to all these features, innovative tools and strategies, Cabirya reaches a wider audience with European films and facilitates the circulation, distribution and promotion of European audiovisual works.
Cabirya will begin a first test phase by offering certain institutional players such as national or regional archives, cinematheques, cinematheques and institutes to take advantage of its tools and its search API for free. Tagging, generating metadata and inserting thousands of hours of historical audiovisual works into Cabirya’s advanced mapping system will make this important cinematic material available also outside the academic circuit.
About the authors
Antonio Emmanouilidis holds an eMBA from TRIUM, awarded jointly by the London School of Economics, New York Stern University and HEC Paris, as well as a Ph.D. in Physics. Antonio has experience leading the technology team in quantitative finance, risk management and trading systems. His experience extends to the area of customer classification and machine learning.
Marco Moretti, film historian, expert librarian, storyteller and cultural animator is the author of various critical interventions, works of fiction and screenplays. He
has contributed to the production of promotional videos and documentaries for various Italian institutions.
Our website is: https://www.cabirya.com
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