Citizen facing European TV and Video News Portal

Expected Impact:

The action is expected to strengthen the European media ecosystem by enabling pan-European, near-real-time access to professional news and public-interest information across EU languages, thereby reducing linguistic and cross-border distribution barriers, improving the reuse, contextualisation and cross-border circulation of such content across the Union, and widening audiences for content from all Member States. By providing multilingual AI-enabled processing and user-facing discovery features, it should improve the findability, accessibility and usability of trusted news content, including for audiences that do not regularly consume cross-border media, and help the sector respond to changing audience habits, including platform-mediated consumption, through more effective search, discovery, contextualisation and user-facing access to trusted content.

The action should also contribute to media pluralism and democratic resilience by broadening access to quality media content and supporting cross-border exposure to diverse sources and perspectives through public-interest discovery principles (user agency, transparency and non-discrimination). It is expected to increase trust in multilingual access by embedding provenance, traceability and clear signalling of AI transformations, alongside quality assurance processes appropriate for news contexts.

Finally, the action should deliver reusable platform capabilities, including, where appropriate, open-source building blocks, operational practices and governance approaches that can be adopted more broadly across Europe. Through structured coordination with other EU-funded initiatives and the proposed sector coordination, it should maximise interoperability, reuse of results and continuity, providing a credible pathway for scaling and future investment under subsequent funding rounds.

The action is also expected to help media organisations adapt to the evolving online environment, support the development of robust business models and practices, and foster pan-European cross-industry and cross-border cooperation, while facilitating future uptake through structured outreach and community-building around the infrastructure, including the collection and consolidation of stakeholder needs and obstacles to adoption, to inform future updates and scale-up.

Objective:

European citizens increasingly access news and current-affairs content through digital services, while key layers of audience access, discovery and distribution are often mediated by large non-European intermediaries. This creates dependencies in Europe’s information space, constrains the cross-border visibility and circulation of European journalism, and increases exposure to manipulation attempts targeting democratic debate. At the same time, Europe’s media market remains fragmented along national and linguistic lines, which limits the ability of trusted professional news and public-interest information to reach audiences across borders. This fragmentation is compounded by the fact that, beyond English, German, French and Spanish, many EU languages remain comparatively under-resourced in terms of AI tools and language technologies.

Against this backdrop, targeted public investment in a shared pan-European infrastructure is justified to address structural barriers that individual media organisations, especially smaller ones, cannot overcome alone. Such an infrastructure can provide common building blocks for near-real-time multilingual processing, cross-border discovery and reliable circulation of trusted content, while reducing technical and cost barriers. This also means addressing not only the availability of trusted content, but the channels and interfaces through which it reaches audiences, including in platform-mediated and social-media-facing environments where news consumption increasingly takes place.

Objectives

To develop, integrate and operate a pilot pan-European multilingual AI media infrastructure (a common backbone of reusable services, interfaces and interoperability specifications) that enables near-real-time ingestion, pooling, processing, search, streaming, multilingual access and cross-border discovery and distribution of professional news and public-interest information and content, including, where relevant, the reuse and contextualisation of existing material and archived content, while embedding public-interest-by-design safeguards, including transparency, provenance, non-discrimination and the ethical use of AI, promoting Europe’s linguistic and cultural diversity, supporting outreach to the sector on needs and obstacles to uptake, and ensuring inclusive participation of smaller and independent media organisations.

Scope:

1. Core pan-European infrastructure backbone and interoperability

Key aspects in scope include:

• Onboarding and requirements consolidation: onboarding of a diverse range of professional media providers across the EU and EU languages, including smaller and local actors, to identify and consolidate technical and operational requirements for a shared infrastructure, including integration needs, metadata and rights information, and workflow constraints; this can be supported through a structured coordination mechanism and targeted technical exchanges.
• Core infrastructure interfaces (input/output): implementation of interoperable, modular architecture and open APIs that enable consistent ingestion and onboarding on the input side and expose services for cross-border discovery and distribution on the output side, compatible with multiple front ends, newsroom tools and third-party services, and ensuring clear source identification.
• Testing and operational validation: testing and validation of the infrastructure under near real time news conditions, including performance, robustness, monitoring and resilience, with measurable criteria demonstrating readiness for wider uptake and scale beyond the project duration.

2. AI technologies for multilingual access, media processing and multimodal enrichment

Key aspects in scope include:

• Core multilingualisation and media processing: AI-enabled transcription (speech-to-text), translation, subtitling, and, where relevant, dubbing/voice-over, designed for near-real-time publishing constraints. Solutions may also support related processing functions such as summarisation, classification and enrichment.
• Multimodal processing, reuse and innovation in formats: beyond translation, proposals are encouraged to include AI functions that improve usability and discoverability and, where relevant, support the reuse and contextualisation of existing or archival material and the pooling of content from different media providers. They may also support interactive/immersive and infotainment-inspired experiences. This may also include, where relevant, experimentation with conversational and agentic access models, such as chatbot or AI-companion style interfaces, and new forms of storytelling or contextualisation.

Quality assurance and performance: workflows that include editorial oversight, targeted human review for high-risk content, and transparent signalling of AI-processed outputs, while addressing latency, compute efficiency and cost-aware deployment considerations to support participation by smaller media organisations.

3. Public-interest discovery, trust and adoption at scale

Key aspects in scope include:

• A structured exchange mechanism and sector coordination group shall be established to connect the pilot with relevant other EU funding programmes, e.g. Horizon Europe projects, and to convene key actors from the European media and technology sectors, with a view to maximising synergies and uptake.
• Public-interest discovery and user agency: search, navigation and recommendation approaches that improve cross-border visibility and pluralism, provide user controls (e.g. language/topic/geography), and avoid discriminatory outcomes, with transparent design principles rather than engagement-only optimisation, including clear presentation of source and context. Particular attention should be paid to core user-facing functions such as media catalogues, search, recommendation and, where relevant, user-modelling or personalisation features, provided these remain aligned with public-interest objectives.
• Trust, provenance and integrity-by-design: traceability of content origin and AI transformations (e.g., translated subtitles, summaries, dubbing), appropriate labelling and accountability mechanisms, and safeguards against manipulation and misleading distribution dynamics in support of democratic resilience, including measures appropriate to mixed ecosystems of media outlets and creators.
• Piloting, uptake and sustainable governance: real-world pilots with measurable KPIs and evaluation, practical onboarding and capacity-building assets (including for smaller/local media and, where relevant, structured cooperation with creators), and credible governance and sustainability pathways aligned with EU values, taking into account audience behaviours, distribution strategies and viable business models.