Amicitia
A collaborative project, "Amicitia" (2002) aimed at making TV and video content available online.
Amicitia: interface
As a cooperation between the Nederlands Instituut voor Beeld en Geluid, ORF, BBC and SWR, Amicitia is aimed at disclosing the European audiovisual archives and making possible a workable digital archiving of television and video content. In Amicitia the different European archives are being centralized and made digitally accessible for professional users and eventually for the general public as well.
The V2_Lab is responsible for the development of the user interface, focusing on an associative and intuitive search and retrieval of audiovisual material. An innovative hybrid media interface enabling the user to create personal story lines from news items from different sources.
In Amicitia users can look for video material from the archives and view it straight away via streaming video. For the duration of the session, every selected item will be stored in the history bar. From this point the user can save a set of related items in a collection or place them in a specific order, creating a very own storyline.
Due to copyright and legal issues, for the moment the interface is targeted at a limited user group and downloading of material is impossible. The narrative user interface is based on future possibilities of network technology, in other words, networks with a high bandwidth, that are expected to be available to the majority of European and international broadcasters. This way, the Amicitia video search interface is one of the experiments for future television services.
