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Research and Innovation | Articles | News | 02/03/2022

Video coverage becomes ‘limitless’ with Drones

Video coverage becomes ‘limitless’ with Drones

Ever wondered how drones can be of service to media agencies? Our latest project from the UFO - Innovation boosted by Small Flying Objects answers that exactly. Alongside Media2day, Pragma-IoT, and AXIOLOGIC RESEARCH, during the period February to October 2022, Hypertech will develop a first-of-its-kind platform called DRONEWS offering crowdsourcing drone video footage in nearly real-time. 

The ‘magic’ of DRONEWS

Reaching inaccessible locations for news coverage, especially in cases of natural disasters and accidents, is one of the greatest challenges news agencies have to face. Currently, the most common way to collect video evidence for such events is through the usage of helicopters. However, this comes at a great cost, which in many cases is unbearable, especially for smaller news agencies. 
DRONEWS aims to address this market gap in a timely and cost-efficient manner. Developing an end-to-end crowdsourcing platform will enable News Agencies and digital media companies the ability to source nearly real-time user-generated drone video streams of remote locations and urgent events such as accidents, disasters, etc. Naturally, this will enrich news coverage and journalistic content while increasing their monetization potential at the same time.

What makes DRONEWS even more innovative is the fact that it not only will enable the crowdsourcing of drone-captured videos in real-time, but also will do the verification of the uploaded videos, include video intelligence for keyframe extraction and annotation of captured scenes, and the fact that it will automatically remove sensitive information from these videos.

Ever wondered how drones can be of service to media agencies? Our latest project from the UFO - Innovation boosted by Small Flying Objects answers that exactly. Alongside Media2day, Pragma-IoT, and AXIOLOGIC RESEARCH, during the period February to October 2022, Hypertech will develop a first-of-its-kind platform called DRONEWS offering crowdsourcing drone video footage in nearly real-time. 

Let’s talk numbers

Globally, there are over 3,000 news publishers representing 18,000 publications and 27,548 TV stations (CIA Factbook) which is the main target audience for the platform. Therefore, the market size for its services is estimated at €1.5 Billion, based on the assumption that there are purchases of 100 hours of drone video coverage per broadcaster/publisher per year with an average cost of €300 per hour of video. 

As DRONEWS will initially focus on the EU market its market size is estimated at €150 Million. Of course, because it could easily expand to other Stock Video footage markets (total market €217 Million) and the Hospitality advertising market (total market estimation €54.27 Billion) the numbers favor the platform. 

What future holds

By selling the DRONEWS solution to News Agencies, Publishers, and Broadcasters, Hypertech, PRAGMA-IoT, and AXIOLOGIC RESEARCH hope to further extend their market position as a software solution provider for the media industries and become market innovators who support the diffusion of SFO technology into these industries. Ultimately, the project aims to bring the paradigm of Airbnb and Uber disruptions into the SFO value chain, where drone owners are enabled to monetize their drones. Following the Airbnb analogy for the generation of a sharing economy, the partners expect DRONEWS to impact the SFO market through the introduction of a drone monetization channel.

After the end of the project, Media2Day will be able to apply the existing business model for publishing drone footage collected via DRONEWS on its own existing electronic news platforms while Hypertech will create new revenue streams from direct sales of DRONEWS platform licenses to other digital publishers. Similarly, Pragma-IoT and AXIOLOGIC RESEARCH will provide added-value services on the captured drone video footage by delivering video annotation and privacy toolkits to the relevant market, always in cooperation with Hypertech & Media2day. 

The project is funded by
Ever wondered how drones can be of service to media agencies? Our latest project from the UFO - Innovation boosted by Small Flying Objects answers that exactly. Alongside Media2day, Pragma-IoT, and AXIOLOGIC RESEARCH, during the period February to October 2022, Hypertech will develop a first-of-its-kind platform called DRONEWS offering crowdsourcing drone video footage in nearly real-time. 

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 873411.

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