The consortium comprises:
· A world-wide service provider with links to content providers: Telefónica (E)
· A world leading service provider with one of the world's largest telecoms research and development facilities: BT Exact (British Telecom Group UK)
· A world leading manufacturer of mobile communications infrastructure and terminals: Motorola (UK)
· A content provider with in-home facilities and technology for video processing: framepool (D)
· A research and development institute specialized in Multimedia services and applications and prime contributor to ISO/MPEG: Fraunhofer HHI (D)
· A leading European research institute: INRIA (F)
· Two leading research universities: Queen Mary University of London (UK) and Technical University Munich (D)

This is a fairly small, but well-focussed consortium that together brings considerable experience and skills to solving this problem in a global context. The purpose is to provide a competitive technological edge that will be fed into the European multimedia services industry, aiming to fulfil user expectations for efficient, mobile and multimedia-based services, ensuring flexibility and security. Having content providers, service providers and manufacturers in the consortium enables the research ideas to be more readily implemented.

The consortium members are experienced and know which problems in emerging multimedia technology are important for Europe. Indeed, all the consortium members have a long track record in European collaborative forums and standardisation bodies. The two most relevant are:

The European COST 211 Action for research on redundancy reduction techniques and content analysis for Multimedia Services. This is a collaborative research forum facilitating the creation and maintenance in Europe of a high level of expertise in the field of video compression and related activities. The core of the consortium has been collaborating for many years within the European COST211 Action. Most of the consortium members are also active members (one of them has served as the chairman) of this Action. For this reason it is not accidental that BUSMAN is designed to tackle one of the most relevant problems in multimedia services with the specific aim of adding value to a community demanding secure seamless and efficient access to multimedia information. BUSMAN will interact with the COST211 activities and contribute to EC development policies.

The MPEG-21 Multimedia Framework standardisation
BUSMAN will influence the evolution of this multimedia standard and use some of its basic elements. The Proposed Draft Technical Report of the emerging multimedia standard MPEG-21 begins with:

'The current state-of-the-art in multimedia technology provides the different players in the multimedia value and delivery chain (from content creators down to end-users) with a huge amount of information and services. Devices and ubiquitous networks enable access to information and services from almost everywhere at anytime. It is still quite difficult to benefit effectively from those various possibilities because the different communities, each with their own models, rules, procedures and interests, have to interact...'

This statement reflects the importance of developing efficient and secure systems for multimedia delivery and access, and confirms the strong need for solving the problems targeted in the BUSMAN project. The vision of MPEG-21 is 'to define such a multimedia framework to enable transparent and augmented use of multimedia resources across a wide range of networks and devices used by the different sectors'. The fact that the overall BUSMAN vision and the MPEG-21 vision match extremely well is not a coincidence. Indeed, in both cases the necessity of defining 'key-elements needed to support the multimedia value and delivery chain' has been a driver in the specification of objectives for and design of this project. It is expected that BUSMAN will profit from the evolution of the MPEG-21 standard and that BUSMAN will influence the development of this Multimedia Framework adding European weight to an emerging standard and contributing to the most important multimedia standardisation process born in Europe and led by Europeans.