Media Streams Metadata Exchange

In recent years technologies for producing multimedia content have become cheap and ubiquitous, while the effective bandwidth for distributing this content has increased, due to greater network capacity and new protocols and formats for using this capacity more efficiently. Unfortunately, the development of applications for finding, sharing, and recombining this content, rather than simply consuming it, has not kept pace. The MSMDX (Media Streams Metadata Exchange) project plans to remedy this by developing a platform to enable users to annotate, find, share, and remix audio and video content in a networked, collaborative fashion. This spring we have studied a single community of active audiovisual content consumer/producers in order to understand their current practices and how they might be supported or changed by new tools. The results of this study have resulted in a set of initial user requirements for the MSMDX platform, to be implemented this summer.