Market and end-users press content industry to reduce prices. This is presently the only solution to setup viable and sustainable business activities with e-content. Production costs have to be drastically reduced maintaining product quality. Content providers, aggregators and distributors need innovative instruments to increase efficiency. A solution is automating, accelerating and restructuring the production process to make it faster and cheaper. The goals will be reached by: (i) accelerating and reducing costs for content production with artificial intelligence algorithms for content composition and formatting and workflow, (ii) reducing distribution and aggregation costs, increasing accessibility, with a P2P platform at B2B level integrating content management systems and workflows, (iii) providing algorithms and tools for innovative and flexible Digital Rights Management, exploiting MPEG-21 and overcoming its limits, supporting several business and transactions models. AXMEDIS consortium (producers, aggregators, distributors and researcher) will create the AXMEDIS framework with innovative methods and tools to speed up and optimise content production and distribution, for production-on-demand. The content model and manipulation will exploit and expand MPEG-4, MPEG-7 and MPEG-21 and others real and de-facto standards. AXMEDIS will realize demonstrators, validated by means of real activities with end-user by leading distributor partners: (i) tools for content production and B2B distribution; (ii) content production and distribution for i-TV-PC, PC, kiosks, mobiles, PDAs. The most relevant result will be to transform the demonstrators into sustainable business models for products and services during the last project year. Additional demonstrators will be 2-3 associated projects launched as take up actions. The project will be supported by activities of training, management, assessment and evaluation, dissemination and demonstration at conference and fairs.
