FLYING EYE MANAGEMENTBERATUNG FUR MEDIENINVESTITIONEN GMBH

Their core work

Flying Eye is a German management consulting firm focused on media investments, based in Darmstadt. Their company name — Managementberatung für Medieninvestitionen — translates directly to "management consulting for media investments," indicating they advise on the business and commercial side of media production and distribution. In EU research projects they appear as an industry end-user or business validation partner, bringing real-world media industry experience into technology-driven consortia working on automated content processing and multi-screen delivery. Their two H2020 participations both sit at the intersection of media production workflows and intelligent content annotation, suggesting they contribute market knowledge and production-context requirements rather than software development.

What they specialise in

How they've shifted over time

Flying Eye's two projects span only a three-year window (2015–2018), so the dataset is too narrow for a long-term trend analysis. Within that window, there is a discernible step: MECANEX addressed the infrastructure problem — how to annotate and serve content rapidly across multiple screens — while PRODUCER applied that same annotation layer to a higher-level creative challenge, generating personalised documentary narratives automatically. This suggests a progression from enabling technology to creative application, tracking the media industry's own shift toward personalised, on-demand content. No post-2018 H2020 activity is recorded, so whether this trajectory continued is unknown.

Between 2015 and 2018 Flying Eye moved from content distribution infrastructure toward AI-assisted personalised production — a direction aligned with streaming-era media trends, though their post-2018 activity is not visible in this dataset.

How they like to work

Flying Eye has never led an H2020 project — both participations are as consortium partner. With 10 unique partners across just 2 projects, they operate in medium-sized consortia (roughly 5 partners per project), typical for ICT Innovation Actions. The absence of repeat partners visible in this data suggests they joined different consortia for each project rather than anchoring a fixed network, pointing to a role as a sought-after industry representative rather than a research-driven hub.

Flying Eye has connected with 10 distinct consortium partners spread across 8 countries in only two projects — a relatively wide geographic spread for a small SME. This points to integration into pan-European ICT and media technology networks rather than a domestic-only footprint.

What sets them apart

Flying Eye occupies a specific niche that is genuinely scarce in ICT research consortia: a small, commercially oriented media investment consultancy that can speak the language of both media industry business models and R&D technology development. Where most digital media partners in H2020 were broadcasters, publishers, or tech vendors, a management consulting firm brings a transactional, investment-oriented perspective on what media technology must deliver to be commercially viable. For a consortium building a media technology product, that is a different and complementary voice from what university labs or platform vendors bring.

Highlights from their portfolio

• PRODUCER
  Personalised documentary creation driven by automatically annotated content is an early example of what would later become mainstream AI-generated media — making this project prescient for its time (2017-2018).
• MECANEX
  Tackled the multi-screen content delivery challenge at a moment when second-screen viewing was still an open engineering and business problem, giving Flying Eye early exposure to cross-platform media distribution workflows.